Spent about 2.5 hours vector-cutting MDF this afternoon, everything normal. Finished that job and was trying to cut some cardstock to see if the drawing I had done would hang together in one piece. Lo and behold, it got halfway through and the laser just faded away to nothing: you could see the cut getting weaker and weaker. Switched back to the MDF settings, worked fine. So I'm trying intermediate speed/power combinations to see if there's something about vectoring at the (much faster) cardstock setting that it doesn't like, as this was the first time I'd used the new tube at anything except full-power dead-slow MDF cutting.

And suddenly the motion system is making horrible noises, no movement, no laser beam. I killed power to everything, laser, computer, the works. Brought everything back up. Works normally for a few minutes (except no beam), then the same noises while it's re-homing, a big thump, and the whole unit goes dead: it had shut itself off. Reboot the computer, check the fuses on the laser (ok), can't get it to power back up. (Note: that model ULS is very...virtual, for lack of a better word. You can't even power it up unless there's a booted computer on the other end of the USB cable.) Odd bit is, the driver at the computer end thinks the laser is still talking to it: it goes through a re-home cycle when you "power up", but nothing is actually happening at the other end and if you hit power-off at the driver end, it ignores it.

I'm thinking either power supply or CPU. There's a USB hub board at the laser end of the cable, but I suspect it's powered by the USB itself and that's all the computer is talking to: if you unplug the USB, the driver notices and complains.

Current short-term plan is to pull the covers and make sure there's nothing obviously wrong with the mechanical part of the motion system, reseat all the internal cabling, and see what if anything changes. My real issue at the moment is the documentation: it goes into excruciating detail on how to change out components (like the CPU and power supply), but zero info on how to test either one. I can put a voltmeter on the P/S outputs, but I don't know how 'smart' it is and if it will show dead because either there's no load on it or it hasn't been told it to turn on.

Any thoughts? I'm really just killing time until I can talk to someone Monday...