I have an 80W Chinese laser that I've been running for about 6 years off of an ancient Dell Optiplex using CorelDraw 12 with the RDCAM/Laserworks plug-in. I bought the laser used and that was it's setup and so it's all I've ever known. The Optiplex just died so I'm building a new controller PC to run the laser. I do all of my design work in Illustrator so I always had to export drawings in to Illustrator 8 and then import into CorelDraw in order to cut. I don't want to do that any more.
What I want to build is a Win 10 machine with Illustrator CC and whatever laser control software makes sense, preferably as a plug-in to Illustrator. I know RDCAM/Laserworks really well and so I'm tempted to stick with it, but I can't get it to install on on my Windows 10 machine and the plug-in to Illustrator doesn't work either.
When I run the RDCAM 6.0.45 install, it completes and says it was successful, but when I try to run Laserworks, I get this error:
2018-04-29 13_07_46-Start.png
The Illustrator plug-in installation also appears to run successfully, but when I open Illustrator, I get this error:
2018-04-29 13_23_06-Start.jpg
So...
If there is a straight-forward way to get Win10/Illustrator/RDCAM/Laserworks stack to work, then I'm all for it.
If it's not possible or if there's a clearly better software stack choice, then I'm all for that.
Any advice?
Thanks!