Why don't Chinese lasers use printer drivers?

[Ross Moshinsky]

I'm afraid you are under estimating the task, and over estimating the potential quality of the outcome. These are ends that never meet.

Programmers's job is never done. You write 90% of the software in 10% of the time, and the rest 10% of the software takes forever.
If you hire 15$ hour programmers you will get 15$ value of software. If you allocate budget for 67 hours or 1000$to fulfill the job you would get exactly what you paid for.

No long term commitment, no vision, no dedication - is a waste of resources for such products.

$15/hr x 40 x 50 = $30,000. That's 3x the national average. That's the equivalent of someone in the US making roughly $150,000 a year.

Considering the Chinese are making lasers for $5000 comparable to lasers Universal charges $20,000 for clearly illustrates the difference in economic needs in China vs the other 1st world countries of the world.

[Zvi Grinberg]

Well , none of my "printer driver" laser files are actually portable to other machines , not even other lasers. They are designed SPECIFICALLY for the driver I am using on my GCC's ...Even on my GCC's , firmware changes often as do drivers , we have to adapt to changes when this happens ...

This is exactly my point. If you bought a ULS in 2007, ALL versions of the drivers which were actually enhanced over the years - can take your old jobs and flawlessly process them.

I did not refer to using the job with irrelevant machines (CNC etc)

Not sure why this is such an issue.. ...
...Just an aside: The suppliers of my 2 chinese machines upgraded their motherboards to newer and better versions , they sent me 3 mother boards and 3 lcd panels for free a month after I bought (2 for machines , 1 for spare) , was a snap to change em , update the software etc. all I had to do was send the old ones back , which cost me $100

And if yet another supplier arrives with even better boards and drivers, you wold have to swap everything all over again. Including the software and therefore your workflow.

The problem really is that the Chinese machines are pretty much not a plug and play newbie friendly machine , but they are in the "affordable" bracket for newbies , but if you want to enter the engraving/lasering field , you need SOME hands on ability. Kind of a catch 22 situation.

I rest my case.

[Zvi Grinberg]

Considering the Chinese are making lasers for $5000 comparable to lasers Universal charges $20,000 for clearly illustrates the difference in economic needs in China vs the other 1st world countries of the world.

You can find even cheaper than that in China.
Still there is no apparent way how and when you would get an easier and friendlier software/user interface/driver. If it was a car you would not buy it.

[Ross Moshinsky]

You can find even cheaper than that in China.
Still there is no apparent way how and when you would get an easier and friendlier software/user interface/driver. If it was a car you would not buy it.

Sounds like the same thing people said about Honda's in the 1970s. Even using your car example, I don't drive around in a S Class Mercedes. Does that mean my Mazda doesn't get me where I need to go?

[Dan Hintz]

Considering the Chinese are making lasers for $5000 comparable to lasers Universal charges $20,000 for...

I wouldn't make that kind of comparison... but I feel this thread is heading in a "personal feeling" direction, so I'll bow out now.

[Zvi Grinberg]

One should make a choice between a system that is continuously being developed and enhanced for many years to come, and DIY machinery.

ULS system (with the connected PC's) are reliable at least as the no name control boards with who knows 1,000 bucks development interface software which are attached to I don't know who built this hardware. Now you see me, now you don't, development "team".

Many of the users I know work on their PC's, preparing additional jobs or editing data, while the machine is working.
Here at our office we also demonstrate 3D printers. We frequently operate a 3D printing job and demonstrate the laser at the same time. 3D printing is a very demanding process that takes many hours to run. In a trade show last year, we operated two 3D printers, each for a day length job, and demonstrated the laser from same notebook. I would not recommend this setup to my customers, but there are space contraints in trade shows.

And if I had a very precious award to process, I don't know any reasonable operator that would care to start watching HD movie right at that time, right at that place. I need to see the first employer who would allow such or similar habbits. Not that it would not work.

[john banks]

Open sourcing it would probably get it done, but Leetro who make the commonly used MCP6515 would have to allow access to their Lasercut source code to let people write stuff for it. Reverse engineering is another possibility but you have to be careful legally. A smart manufacturer could do very well and get a whole "mod" scene around their controllers, like happens with automotive ECUs, routers, cell phones etc.

[john banks]

Do Universal hold the single job in the controller's memory or does it rely on the PC to be connected for the entire job?

I would not underestimate even cheap embedded microcontrollers and their ability to control a job with precision and efficient code especially with hardware timers, latching, interrupts, buffered values etc. Some of the time critical code I deal with on microcontrollers (running engines) couldn't (easily/fire and forget/mission critical) be implemented on an average but ludicrously overpowered PC running Windows despite the processing power being orders of magnitude higher. Some open source CNC controller software uses a realtime Linux kernel for this reason. PCs running Windows are rarely suitable for precise timing control without a microcontroller running the actual job and the PC just dumping instructions to it. Too many things outside the software author's control - virus scanners, other software autoupdating, viruses, stupid users, enforced restarts, other buggy software etc.

[Lee DeRaud]

I don't pay much attention to Universal but that method sounds like a terrible idea. Streaming is one of the most inconsistent ways to deal with information. What if there is a signal interruption? What if the computer freezes? What if I start watching a HD movie and it starts eating computer resources?

Seriously? There is a vast difference between streaming a movie over the internet vs transmitting a print job piecemeal over a USB cable. If nothing else, the laser is actually quite tolerant of interruptions to its communication flow for any packet size larger than a scan line, something that cannot be said of music or video.

(Note that the interface method ULS uses is virtually identical to that used by every inkjet printer on the planet.)

[Lee DeRaud]

Do Universal hold the single job in the controller's memory or does it rely on the PC to be connected for the entire job?

I would not underestimate even cheap embedded microcontrollers and their ability to control a job with precision and efficient code especially with hardware timers, latching, interrupts, buffered values etc. Some of the time critical code I deal with on microcontrollers (running engines) couldn't (easily/fire and forget/mission critical) be implemented on an average but ludicrously overpowered PC running Windows despite the processing power being orders of magnitude higher. Some open source CNC controller software uses a realtime Linux kernel for this reason. PCs running Windows are rarely suitable for precise timing control without a microcontroller running the actual job and the PC just dumping instructions to it. Too many things outside the software author's control - virus scanners, other software autoupdating, viruses, stupid users, enforced restarts, other buggy software etc.

There seems to be a misconception here: yes, the ULS setup requires the computer to be connected to the laser for the entire job.

But no, the computer is not, repeat NOT, controlling the laser at the realtime hardware level, it is merely transmitting the job in discrete chunks (eg vector endpoints and raster scan lines) to the microcontroller on the laser.

[Dan Hintz]

PCs running Windows are never suitable for precise timing control without a microcontroller running the actual job and the PC just dumping instructions to it. Too many things outside the software author's control - virus scanners, other software autoupdating, viruses, stupid users, enforced restarts, other buggy software etc.

Fixed that for ya...

Windows is simply not designed to be an RTOS, so other software running in the background isn't the problem. There's no direct way to get a timeslice small enough in Windows to appear real-time to the user, and direct hardware interrupt is a no-go.

[john banks]

I wrote "never" and changed it to "rarely" as you can be sure someone will claim they have realtime running on Windows Now they can argue with you instead of me I do believe you COULD do a pretty good job of controlling a laser at the realtime hardware level but you'd have to use native code and waste a lot of processsing cycles with a high priority task (after all you can emulate in software a much lower power microcontroller's hardware interrupts and do a pretty good job), and there is still a probability (you may edit to "certainty" if you like) of glitches compared to a microcontroller of less than 1% of the outright processing power, but Lee has confirmed what I suspected that none of this is the issue anyway, it is user convenience and supposed portability of a printer driver.

There are some interesting open source printer driver projects out there, but I see the main roadblock is the closed source info on the controller protocols.

These Chinese plug - ins to Coreldraw etc, do they use VBA? Presumably Lasercut or similar just gets executed and the file name is a parameter? It goes through a dxf or similar file on the disk though rather than a page control language?

[Dan Hintz]

These Chinese plug - ins to Coreldraw etc, do they use VBA? Presumably Lasercut or similar just gets executed and the file name is a parameter? It goes through a dxf or similar file on the disk though rather than a page control language?

From my quick investigation (thanks to Rodney for the manuals to his machines), if memory serves they change everything to Adobe Illustrator format... likely because someone had an AI-based software chunk already written, and it went from there. I believe it was a script of some form or another you run from inside Corel.

[john banks]

Are there any concerns about accuracy, rounding, conversion, data loss/glitches from this method, whether practical or theoretical? (ie is it a good model to follow for a possible printer driver if we can convert PCL5 or whatever to AI and then pass it on). How would you design it ground up if you had the time?

[Ross Moshinsky]

One should make a choice between a system that is continuously being developed and enhanced for many years to come, and DIY machinery.

ULS system (with the connected PC's) are reliable at least as the no name control boards with who knows 1,000 bucks development interface software which are attached to I don't know who built this hardware. Now you see me, now you don't, development "team".

Many of the users I know work on their PC's, preparing additional jobs or editing data, while the machine is working.
Here at our office we also demonstrate 3D printers. We frequently operate a 3D printing job and demonstrate the laser at the same time. 3D printing is a very demanding process that takes many hours to run. In a trade show last year, we operated two 3D printers, each for a day length job, and demonstrated the laser from same notebook. I would not recommend this setup to my customers, but there are space contraints in trade shows.

And if I had a very precious award to process, I don't know any reasonable operator that would care to start watching HD movie right at that time, right at that place. I need to see the first employer who would allow such or similar habbits. Not that it would not work.

No offense, but you sound like every laser rep I've ever spoken to.

1. Who says the Chinese machines aren't being developed? Rodne bought a laser and right after it came, a new main board came out. How is that not development? You're telling me Universal has been using essentially the same board system since 2007. How is that development?

2. There is a big difference between running a demo and running a shop. Our computers are doing anything from internet research, to processing graphics, to responding to emails, to typing invoices, ect ect ect. Getting on a bad web page or jamming the PC up trying a new graphics technique is part of doing business. It happens. The trade show environment is controlled. You have 5 files and just run them all day. They are all processed and ready to go.

3. Again, it was a for instance. If a job is running for 2 hours and it's a Sunday and you've already put in a 60 hour week, watching a movie is not farfetched. My question is, what can and can't I do while running the job? I mean I don't understand why anyone would realistically want to limit their PCs production when the average laser file size is just not that large and could fit on an on-board memory.

Seriously? There is a vast difference between streaming a movie over the internet vs transmitting a print job piecemeal over a USB cable. If nothing else, the laser is actually quite tolerant of interruptions to its communication flow for any packet size larger than a scan line, something that cannot be said of music or video.

(Note that the interface method ULS uses is virtually identical to that used by every inkjet printer on the planet.)

I'm well aware that there are different levels of streaming media, but you're still streaming media. Now if ULS strongly suggested using a PC dedicated to running the laser, I could buy into their thinking. This is the way CNCs and high production print shops have been run for years. That's the only way I would think that Universal's system would make sense. Running the laser and doing work off the same PC is just asking for trouble.