Integrating laser lines

I just bought 3 laser line diodes and I’m looking for a way to integrate control from the plasmaC. I found a good deal on some nice modules so I bought all thy had (3 cost me $150). I could not get my self to buy Chinese junk and fell I love with this industrial modules. My question is do I need to current limit these, I would think that is built into them as thy are not bare diodes. I would love to be able to switch them on and off with an on screen button. I’m going to use 2 to generate an X under the center of the torch and the 3rd to project a line along the X axis to aline the sheet.

I had a few thoughts on how to power it up. One was to run it off my dedicated 5v supply that also powers the ohmic and switch it with an extra opto22 or a relay. Next was just to power them right off the boards outputs. But I’m not sure if it would handle the 3 50ma draws. Here are a few pictures of what I got. Thy have 2.5mm 5v dc jacks in the rear.

Looks like they just need (switched) 5V power

(an OPTO relay may or may not work at 5V though)

I have a 7i76ED that’s sinking.

Just looked it up and it looks like I can sink up to 300ma per output. Which is weird to call it outputs even thought thy are grounds that I turn on and off lol. But I guess in the grand scheme of things electrons do go from negative to positive so it is outputting. Any ways what do you think?

My thought was to have 2 wired togather so it forums the X and then another one on a short section of rail at the end of the table. This way I can slide it on the rail up and down in the Y so it lines up with where my sheet is abd I can tweak the sheet straight inline. Or I could have it on the Y axis and just move the torch along the Y to line up the line.

The 7I76ED outputs are good for ~300 mA so should be fine

so 5V --> Laser --> 7I76ED-out

This means 5V common must be connected to field I/O common

I did not have enough existing wires in my DB9 connector running up to the gantry but I had 24 volt up on the gantry. SO I added a $3 step down power supply to reduce that to 5.0 volt and added a manual switch to power the laser.

What some have done with line lasers is to make an L shaped bracket that clamps round the torch at the corner of the L and holds the line laser for X & Y of to the side. Then they angle them a bit to create a crosshair. I think islander261 does it this way. To calibrate this, cut an L shape and reposition the torch over the corner and align each laser so they are exactly on the cut lines.

I just used a crosshair laser.

I use a gmoccappy macro gcode subroutine to bring the torch to the laser position and set the offsets to 0,0

I think the nice thing about using 2 separate line lasers is that it is not dependent on z location.