Hand holding??

[Bruce Volden]

I've been approached by a local school ag. dept. teacher to help him get their new Chinese laser up and running.
I have no problems with that! They rcv'd a grant and purchased a 60W Orion Motor Tech.
I have been engraving with a laser for more than 20 years now and am pretty proficient.
ENTER---supposedly the software for this machine resides on a flash drive??
I know Corel well and am concerned about sending artwork to machine through RD Works.
I'll be installing in 2 weeks and am trying to get ahead of the curve.

Be watching for me. Thanks in advance.

Bruce

[Kev Williams]

Copy the flash drive to a spot on your hard drive, then install from that, keep the flash drive in a safe place...

You must think of RD works as nothing more than a print driver, albeit a fancy one that will let you move stuff around if need be... That's about ALL I do with my chinese Lasersoft/PHcad machine software...

Do EVERYTHING in Corel, export to RD works. Set speed/power/resolution, focus it, run it. If there's any editing to be done, go back to Corel, edit, re-export it. I sometimes have 20 or more working files in my software of exactly the same thing, I refuse to attempt any editing! I'll reposition sometimes, but that's it...

What makes it easy for me: My machine is a 1300x900mm machine. So I have a 'Triumph' table size in Corel that's 1300x900, and I outline the perimeter with a 50% black 8pt outline, which gets exported with everything else. What sending the outline does is make the top-left corner of the machine 0/0, and the machine's coordinates perfectly match the Corel's coordinates. If something is centered in Corel at 100mm from left and 100mm down, that's exactly where the machine will engrave it.

I build 'artificial' corners for the machine using scraps of Rowmark and whatever else I have handy ;) .. Takes a minute or so to figure out exactly where that corner is on the table is-- once I do, I make guideline corners in Corel and base everything I do from there. If it's right in Corel, it'll be right on the machine :)

The only thing to remember is to turn off the outline on the RD works screen :D

[Bill George]

I wonder who decided to purchase a Chinese laser with no support for a school? When I was teaching, anything that was purchased had to have a Warranty and Support. What happens is you spend a lot of time training one guy and then he decides to leave next year for greener pastures? You could come in as an Adjutant Instructor and get paid to teach or assist?

[Mike Null]

Bill

Lots of things hard to explain with schools. In our district we have 4 high schools, each with their own Epilog laser but when it came time to put the district logo on 3900 chromebooks they put it out for bid. My bid was exactly twice as high as the winning bid.

[Bill George]

Bill

Lots of things hard to explain with schools. In our district we have 4 high schools, each with their own Epilog laser but when it came time to put the district logo on 3900 chromebooks they put it out for bid. My bid was exactly twice as high as the winning bid.

I taught for 12 years at a local Community College. Sounds like a sweetheart deal. Common sense would say it would be a good student project.

[Ray Scott]

I looked up the "60W Orion Motor Tech" laser machine and it appears to be using RDWorks and Ruida controller. I suggest that you download the newest version of the software. As of today I think I trust the 8.01.32 ..
1. Do your designs in Corel Draw Suite
2. Export as DXF(version 2004 is good) or BMP, JPG, ...
3. Open RDWorks V8
4. Import DXF file
5. set your mode, speed, power
6. Download to laser machine

AS an experienced laser user, you should find RDWorks is really not so bad. .. there are plenty of video tutorials out there on YouTube. ... and vendor web sites.

[Bruce Volden]

Thanks for all the replies!
Going in this afternoon. They finally rcv'd the last pallet? which included the water chiller.

Bruce