Offset laser marker for maslow

I don’t have my maslow yet, so I’m going off of images that I’ve seen posted here, but I am already considering modding it a bit and was wondering if anyone had tried this or what they think of it.

With the extra aux ports, it might be possible to trigger a small diode laser (no more than 2 watts) that is mounted on the sled, offset by a known amount from the center of the sled. Looking at the sled, the obvious location would be above the ring, assuming you can keep your laser low enough that it doesn’t interfere with the chains. The laser could be used for marking cut parts and for testing your files before you cut them.

I don’t think the maslow has enough resolution for detailed laser marking, but it should be capable of simple text and lines. Are any of the aux ports pwm modulated? PWM is used in grbl with the spindle speed command to set the intensity of these diode lasers.

While it seems an easy thing to design hardware wise, the software gets more tricky. Does the maslow have any capability for secondary offset tools? How difficult would this be to add?
The math shouldn’t be all that difficult, if the machine knows where the router bit is, surely it knows or can be told what is a few inches above the router bit as well.

2 Likes

The Maslow doesn’t have any provision for an offset tool

Also, the sled will rotate, so you won’t have a constant offset

the maslow does not have a spare PWM available.

@Jatt welcome to our group. It has been fielded before but now as I look at it a laser mark of such a low watt is probably more work then using a pen. I dill and off set a hole and mount a pencil for “testing” without cutting. While the software is not set up fo this it is pretty easy to do by hand. For instance if you we 6 inches lower and to the right in X & Y just move your point of origin up by 6 and left by 6, run as normal. Easy-peesy

I’m more and more attracted to pen attachments to the Z axis.

Thank you

The TLE5206 board has 3 PWM AUX pins, but the firmware would need work to support them.

1 Like

It sounds like you are not the only one working on this :grin:

2 Likes