Laser Cutter - What type of laser is? How to drive the laser power supply?

[Axxel]

Dear friends!

I found an old 98's laser cutter abondonated in an enterprise. I asked for it and they said me: Leave it at your workshop! It's a present for you! Ohhh yeahhhh, great!!!

I thought this machine Hermes VanGuard Laser 2001 is a classic Co2 laser cutter, working with old parallel port and MS-DOS or windows 9x software, the only thing I have to do is quitting the obsolete electronics and use a classic Arduino UNO with GRBL to free the machine and give it a new oportunity and this tool can be helpful for some projects.



I opened the machine, and I get really surprised when I saw the laser it have! Aparently, looks to be a CO2 laser air cooled... Only I have to understand how I can PWM drive the power supply and here we go! So I desarmed the power supply and I get rally surprised to see the quality of the electonics and these high frequency mosfets! Woooow! Why this technology?... I started to documente myself about this and I conclued this laser isn't a CO2 laser but a ARGON LASER!





The laser power supply pictures:







Here is the input to the "laser tube":



So my firt question is : What type of laser is it?

Unfortunaly, the machine miss some sensors and some unknown stuff (there is free conectors) and it is imposible for me to get working the machine in stock conditions due to these missing parts.

I tried to investigate to see what type of signals I can send to the laser power supply.





The big red and black cable is the general power, 48VDC. The yellow cable have 12VDC, and it is connected to the open door sensors, like a safety.

And the three little cables red, black, and white are going direcly to some microcontroller outputs on the motherboard of he laser cutter.

I tried to send some PWM and low-high states to these 3 little cables with an Arduino, nothing... Impossible to start the laser.

Unfortunately, there is nothing of informations in the web of these devices...

My second question is : Anyone know this brand of laser power supply? Is there a known diagram or instructions of how to use it? Or if there is some instructions of a similar laser at electronics level for the way of how to drive a power supply like that could be helpful for me to get working this laser.

Here some pictures of the FPGAs and Uc Main Board of the laser cutter:








Cheers

[bob225]

theres plenty of info about on laser cutters most manufacturers will have service info available, the laser will be a standard off the shelf diode it depends on how its driven tho

Btw its a 25w engraving laser

[chris_leyson]

It's a 25W CO2 slab laser from Universal Laser Inc, they need 48V at around 10A supply and will have a PWM input to modulate the power. You might have to get in touch with Universal Laser to get a data sheet.

[james_s]

That looks like an RF pumped CO2 laser, they are or at least were fairly common in smaller sizes.