I really like the use of the interface board as well and the final design. That’s a lot of controls (input/output/air) in one box. Kudos on this!
I don’t see why not, there are going to be a few version of it based on what accessories you want to hook to it.
PWM is coming from Acorn, we can’t send that over ethernet. We’re still working out the topology for how the boxes will work, but technically you can have an Aux box AND a laser box on one system, but that’s going to make for a LOT of boxes on a machine.
What we’re working towards is a way to replace the laser box with a smaller external box that will get fed by the aux box. You’ll harvest the laser controller from your laser control box and put it in this smaller external box.
That’s a pretty fuzzy description, but when I’ve got more details (like a prototype to share) I will share it.
Thanks Michael! Our engineers rock! They take stuff that I wire (poorly) and make it look super nice 
and in all cases: work a LOT better!
Cool, hope that happens
Makes sense. In the video you mentioned laser control, and I couldn’t think how that could possibly drive the PWM signal over ethernet.
Also makes sense, I didn’t think about the laser driver itself.
If it helps, from a PM perspective, I’m in the camp of having Ex (upgrade) and original 15W laser. I’d love the I/O potential of this box with ether16, in particular if there are spare pneumatic valves available. Since going Ex, tool changes aren’t my production bottleneck – I just have a lot of ISO30 tool holders. ATC would be great, but I use far more tools than would fit on a 5’ wide table (and I don’t think a rack long Y would make sense), so regular manual tool changes would still be involved. That said, any investment like this box that supports perhaps future ATC rack would help justify the expense.
There will be plenty of extra pneumatic valves available. With the switchable outputs you can map any amount of them over to standard dry contact relays for driving electrical stuff too.
You can use your 15 watt laser with this too.
If you do a rack, you’re not limited to the tools that are in the rack. The software that we’re shipping with this will work with up to 200 tools, so if you have 12 in your rack those tools will auto change, any tools higher the control will just ask you to insert when the time comes. You can mix and match between rack tools and non rack tools too during a job.