Mach 3 PWM greyscale?

Everything Lasers
1

I’ve been successfully using an Endurance 10W laser on my CNCRP 2’x8’ machine with Mach 3 for a the past 2 years. I use it mainly for cutting thin wood veneers and some simple single power engravings. I use M11/M10 commands for this. I use Lightburn to generate G-code with some manual edits to place the M11/10 commands.

I would like to do some more complicated graphic engravings but so far I have not been successful in making any greyscale engravings.

Has anyone else on here been successful in this type of engraving? If so what hardware/software are you using?

I can provide screenshots of my Mach 3 set up also if it helps anyone.

2

I doubt if you can do much in that area with Mach3. As far as I know, the M10/M11 commands are the only ones synch’d to motor movements for lasering in Mach3, and you really need a power setting command (like M67 in the more recent ESS plugin for Mach4).

3

The M11/10 command include parameters for power. The M11 command typically looks something like this,

M11 P2 S100

P2 refers for the port at which the laser is installed on the ESS and in mach 3

4

I control my laser power using a virtual axis (in my case the C Axis). I connected it to an Arduino that interprets the step/dir pulses and generates the PWM signal. Sending G0 C0.255 is maximum power, G0 C0.127 is half power. That axis has extremely high acceleration since it has no mass. One of the advantages is that it is motion coordinated and compatible with pretty much any control software, but obviously you’ll need to modify the g-code.