OK @vicious1 … Hear me out… Jackpot board… On glass/acrylic… edge lit… BOOM!!!
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That’s pretty neat and kinda mirrors how it is to design with some of the more interesting substrates out there like aluminium or solid teflon etc.
Without a way to do easy and reliable layer transitions then it’ll never be suitable for anything other than relatively simple circuits as shown there, though.
It should still be possible to either rivet or plate through-holes with glass.
Fundamentally, the issue is that in a good design, there should be a bunch of copper planes around for EMC and signal integrity purposes, so the effect of the glass itself would be somewhat diminished.
An edge-lit board with the light coming out between traces sounds epic, though.
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You can have an aluminum pcb?!? That is wild.
We could do a two sided Jackpot that would be workin clear but there are a ton of VIA’s we would need a really accurate machine to drill a bunch of holes…wait a minute…
Yeah, most LED lighting is done on aluminium substrate PCBs. I have a sideline product that’s a 150W high-CRI LED array on an aluminium substrate for a machine-vision application:
We’ve also used aluminium boards for some high-voltage boards as a test. It’s a bit scary having a few kV on traces when your substrate is conductive and there’s only a few hundred microns of insulation in between.
There’s accurate and then there’s PCB milling accurate 
I have an LPKF protomat S64 for PCB machining but it’s a bit of a beast. 0.5mm drills at 60k RPM. Acrylic would be kinder on the drills than FR4, at least, but way less likely to enjoy being soldered on, I suspect. A 0.5mm hole in glass seems like a nightmare.
Could probably do it with larger drilled holes with reduced capacity on the board. Vias get nasty to work with at larger hole sizes, though, just from a routing standpoint.
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Bringing these questions over from the cutting acrylic thread…
I installed Lightburn on my Garage PC (windows 10) and no dice. Lightburn cant find the board. Nothing for windows pops up at the bottom left when I plug it in and lightburn just returns an empty screen
Was CP210x USB to UART driver ever installed on this PC before? Would have been if you’ve successfully connected other ESP devices to the machine before.
Does the COM port show up in Windows Device Manager?
Hopefully just driver issue and not dead board?
Related:
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I brought the board into my office PC and have it connected now. I do show a COM port on this computer (forgot to check on the garage one). I have speakers in here so i hear the chime when i plug it in. Still cant get lightburn to read it. This is what i get after it scanning connected devices…
Device Manager shows it as COM3
verified by unplugging and that COM3 goes away. Comes back when I plug it back in.
I have 0 experience with Lightburn. Could this be because I’m running trial version still??
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Is it because I haven’t changed the Config to laser??
Now I need to figure out how to get the config file off of the board so I can edit this part
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Shouldn’t be I have tested all of them, most several times.
No, That is only for the type of moves you get. It should show up as a GRBL board.
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On all four of your devices you do not get an SSID of FluidNC? Cell phones android or iphone? Of everything my android phone connects the easiest, I have not tested an Iphone yet but can in a couple hours.
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They all showed the SSID and I used 12345678 as the password. I will try again and take some screen shots this time of what it shows
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I SWEAR it wouldn’t work on anything last night lol…
Lightburn still cant find it via usb
I did end up taking the ESP32 off the board and put it back. Maybe resetting the pins changed something? shouldn’t have bit idk
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It shouldn’t I test them with the board on.
I will see if there is a setting or something I did with lightburn, I did install it a long time ago for the previous grbl tests so maybe I forgot something.
Good to hear, I am very interested in connection issues. Like I said the only one I have come across was saved by clearing all the browser cache. So who knows what else lurks out there.
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Yeah I’m not sure. It wouldn’t even let me connect at all last night. I could see it but would tell me incorrect password.
Going to attempt to define laser in the config. Wish me luck LOL
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Ok I “think” I’m doing this right…
I deleted the # infront of all of the laser stuff…
I also changed the steps_per_mm from 50 to 150 for X and Y. And set the mas_travel_mm to 610 for both for my size Primo. All this correct and ok??
Edit:
After making those changes and uploading the new config.yaml i got an alarm after reboot. I dont remember getting one before but honestly I may have just not seen it.
$G
[GC:G0 G54 G17 G21 G90 G94 M5 M9 T0 F0 S0]
ok
$Report/Interval=1500
<Alarm|MPos:0.000,0.000,0.000|FS:0,0|WCO:0.000,0.000,0.000>
[MSG:INFO: Channel auto report interval set to 1500 ms]
ok
<Alarm|MPos:0.000,0.000,0.000|FS:0,0|WCO:0.000,0.000,0.000>
[GC:G0 G54 G17 G21 G90 G94 M5 M9 T0 F0 S0]
$/axes/x/max_travel_mm
$/axes/x/homing/mpos_mm
$/axes/x/homing/positive_direction
$/axes/y/max_travel_mm
$/axes/y/homing/mpos_mm
$/axes/y/homing/positive_direction
$/axes/x/max_travel_mm=1000.000
ok
$/axes/x/homing/mpos_mm=0.000
ok
$/axes/x/homing/positive_direction=true
ok
$/axes/y/max_travel_mm=1000.000
ok
$/axes/y/homing/mpos_mm=0.000
ok
$/axes/y/homing/positive_direction=true
ok
Board isn’t hooked to anything on the machine right now. Its sitting here at my desk plugged in USB and I have the 24v power supply plugged in
Still trying to figure this out. I have the USB plugged into the computer and its showing up in device manager as COM4
Lightburn just keeps saying waiting for connection
Edit to add much later…but cant have another reply in a row…
Gave up on lightburn for now and just got the machine wired up. Plugged the board in and as soon as I did it locks all the motors down. connect to the WIFI and bring up the webui. Try moving one axis at a time. nothing. tried homing. nothing. All my endstops work according to the lights. Everything is plugged in per the docs. Idk what I’m doing wrong. I see exactly why you didn’t want me to do any testing for these @vicious1 lol
Edit to add… I’m a Dumba$$…but that’s already known lol. Apparently I screwed something up in the config file and that’s why it wouldn’t move the machine. It was ignoring the config file due to panic. So I uploaded the one from the v1 github and all is well with the word again. Will have to enable the laser part at some point but I’m going to wait to hear from someone much smarter than me on what I did wrong the first time. I put screen shots of everything i touched
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I’m just here to help…
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Thank you!!
Ok now that I can post again here is where imp at. I have the machine moving. I have the laser mounted and wired up to GPIO 27 which is what the config.yaml file says. I have deleted the # in front of all of the laser stuff. When I upload that file the machine goes into panic mode. After start up I cant move anything and if I hit $SS I see “error config file ignored due to panic” I cant figure out what I’m doing wrong by just uncommenting the laser stuff???
It looks like user outputs is also claiming gpio.27, which will conflict if you just uncomment the laser section.
user_outputs:
...
digital1_pin: gpio.27
Maybe digial1_pin should be disabled (NO_PIN) by default and someone wanting to use it for a special purpose can enable it.
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