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Douglas Repetto
04-24-2008, 10:07 PM
We made our first cuts with our new BrightStar LG500tt laser today! John from BrightStar came to help us get it installed. I thought I'd share the experience so far. In the last few months we've searched for specific info on people's experiences with these machines, and other than the great posts here we haven't found much.

I called Jim at BrightStar a month or so again and we talked for about a half hour about their different machines and options. After thinking it over for a few days we decided to go for it. It took a few days to get the shipping details worked out and to schedule an install, but once we did everything went smoothly.

The machine was delivered FedEx last week in a giant crate. The crate was in pretty bad shape when it arrived (it looked like it was torqued at some point), but everything inside was fine. It arrived right when Brightstar said it would arrive, and FedEx tracking was no problem (as usual).

We took everything out of the crate and inspected it. Water cooler (passive via an internal radiator), great looking Chinese air compressor, blower, PCI control card, and of course the laser itself. Everything was fine except that the air compressor had a European plug on it. I cut it off an put on a North American plug and it worked fine (it was rated for 110v).

Then we waited a week for the install to happen. It was tough, but I wanted to make sure that if anything was wrong the BrightStar people would be on site to fix it...

Today at 8am John arrived. He quickly assembled the various parts, fixed a couple quick cosmetic issues (a water hose had some sheath missing, stuff like that), and showed us some mechanical aspects of the machine.

Then we installed the PCI card (kinda sketchy looking, very old skool) and the LaserCut software in our PC. This is where we hit our first (and only) big problem -- the PC crashed every time we loaded the software. We tried to troubleshoot for a while, and John put some calls in to BrightStar HQ, but we couldn't figure out the problem. John happened to have a PC (!) with him in his truck, so he brought that in so that we could continue with the setup and training.

The card and software in his PC worked fine and in a moment we had the machine running. The focus was way off so we spent some time focusing the lenses. There was only one lense that needed to be tweaked, it took about 5 minutes to get it right. Then we started cutting!

The software isn't super sophisticated, but it's quite usable. I'm used to tweaky software (we use Mach3 for our CNC mill), and it's fine so far.

We did some more trainging (maintenance, safety, etc) and then John had to take his PC with him for another install.

I started poking around in our non-working PC and realized that the Mach3 driver loads at startup and takes pretty firm control of the OS. I thought that maybe the LaserCut driver was trying to do the same thing. So I went into the XP hardware/driver config and disabled the Mach3 driver and restarted. And what do you know, it worked!

So now I've been experimenting all day. Cutting, engraving, vectors, bitmaps, glass, paper, fabric, etc. It's terrific. We're very happy with the quality so far, the kerf is basically non-existent, the machine seems quite fast (much faster than the mill, that's for sure!), and we have had no problems at all with the software.

Of course, this is just the first day! But so far our experience with BrightStar has been totally positive.

douglas

John Barton
04-26-2008, 5:12 AM
That's great. I also got a new Chinese laser last week and it had a few bumps with the software.

Are you using LaserCut 5.1 with the Corel plugins? Just a word of advice that may or may not apply. We found that the plugin would not work with long file names separated by spaces or dashes. After we debugged that it works fine.

Douglas Repetto
04-26-2008, 9:38 AM
Hi John,

We generally either prepare graphics in Illustrator (on a mac) or generate HPGL files via custom code. Then import into LaserCut. I'm not sure what version we're using (away from the laser now) but I assume it's the latest version...

Btw, although the LaserCut manual and the software insist that it will only import .ai version 7 files, I've found that version 8 files work fine (our version of illustrator will only export down to version 8). When we import the image LaserCut complains several times but it does import in the end.

best,
douglas

Douglas Repetto
05-04-2008, 12:42 AM
In my first post I said that we had a conflict between the Mach3 driver that runs our cnc mill and the LaserCut software that came with our Brightstar laser. Today I needed to use the cnc mill so I reenabled the Mach3 driver. Just for fun I ran the LaserCut software again, expecting it to crash. But it didn't! All evening I've been running both the Mach3 controlled cnc-mill and the laser (although not at exactly the same time) with no problems at all.

So now I think that our original crashing problem was due to the PCI card not being well-seated in the slot. Everything's been running great since we fixed that.

Mohammed Hasham
05-05-2008, 3:59 PM
I have a engraver that used the lasercut software. I don't like it at all. Maybe because I doing something wrong. Would anyone have any manuals?

Thanks

Douglas Repetto
05-05-2008, 5:34 PM
We received a photocopied LaserCut manual with our laser. If there's a specific question you have I can look it up. I haven't had any problems with LaserCut, but that's probably because we are only using it to resize and cut, we're not using any of the other features.

John Barton
09-11-2008, 10:17 PM
Hope this helps someone!

www.jbcases.com/lasercut5-instructions.doc (http://www.jbcases.com/lasercut5-instructions.doc)

The manual for using LaserCut5.0 Useful for those who own chinese lasers and don't have it.