Please Help With Setup Laser Pro Mercury Laser Engraver

[Jerry Allen]

I thought I had responded to this. Like everything else I do lately, I get sidetracked.

I have not been able to get a USB to LPT port adapter to work, and do not think it will.
I suspect something is lost in the translation between USB and a real parallel port.
You can do a lot of tricks with a parallel port sending signals and reversing directions, some of which cannot be replicated through a USB port.
USB ports can only send and receive serial data. Therefore, USB is a much better match for a COM1 port and no signals get lost in the driver.

I also originally used the VM (virtual machine) for XP on Windows 7 Pro, thinking that the 3.58 GCC drivers were too old to work.
That turned out to be untrue. You just have to use 32bit Windows 7, and it can be Home Premium. This works way better than the virtual machine which complicates drivers and messes with memory allocation. The latter is more critical with 32 bit, because you can only address about 3.5GB of RAM with 32 BITS. The drivers were not compiled for 64 bit for the Merc 1 and therefore simply will not work.

One thing that would be nice is if GCC would let go of the specs for the parallel port and some other device information. Then someone could conceivably modify or recompile the drivers. The whole method of only allowing their vendors to distribute drivers and information just does not work well.

Welcome back, Jerry and thanks from all Mercury users for the tip-especially useful now that Winxp is in its death throes.
I was also able to get the Mercury 1 to print from Win7-but used the virtual WinXP that comes as an option to Win7 Pro. Ity was on a computer that had an LPT1 port so don't know what would happen with a USB-LPT1 converter.
Best Regards,
George
Laserarts

[Dan Hintz]

I have not been able to get a USB to LPT port adapter to work, and do not think it will.
I suspect something is lost in the translation between USB and a real parallel port.
You can do a lot of tricks with a parallel port sending signals and reversing directions, some of which cannot be replicated through a USB port.
USB ports can only send and receive serial data. Therefore, USB is a much better match for a COM1 port and no signals get lost in the driver.

You can get a proper USB-to-serial and USB-to-parallel converter to work, but you have to get one that converts all signals it sees. not just the basic ones. These will be more expensive than the cheapest units you can find on eBay, but they do exist.

The only time I really see issues with USB-to-parallel is when it comes to tight timing requirements between signals... not every case will work well here, but a laser engraver should not be one of those times.

[Jerry Allen]

Dan,
I'd be interested to know a model number if anyone has actually tried a USB-parallel adapter that actually works.
I have not been able to find one (okay, I only tried 3 different ones).
I also suspect that the GCC drivers handle the data differently as far as buffering to the Mercury's motherboard goes.
Serial just sends bytes. Parallel is capable of unique commands that may not translate well or at all.