Blastpit
Description
blastpit adds additional functionality to the Rofin Easyjewel marking system. Features will (hopefully) include:
- Network control of laser marking
- Enhanced positioning help
- Controller support
- Python language support
- An Inkscape plugin
blastpit is composed of:
- The blastpit library, containing the core class and geometry functions, along with bindings for the Python language
- lmos-tray, the interface to the Rofin LMOS ActiveX control
Notes
Obtaining the code
The development git repository can be found here
Blastpit has some submodule dependencies, so you will need to clone the repository recursively:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/TheHoodedFoot/blastpit.git
Prerequisites for building
A standard POSIX development environment (shell, compiler, linker).
SWIG is needed to create the Python language bindings.
Zig is used for cross-compiling.
Mongoose is used for the WebSockets server and client code.
Qt with ActiveQt is required for the Rofin LMOS ActiveX control, either running natively on Windows or under emulation using Wine or a virtual machine.
Building on Linux
NOTE
The build instructions have only been tested on Funtoo Linux, and are likely to fail on other distributions, which may not be shipped with certain dependencies used here.
Blastpit
The core files and WebSockets server, which are required by the Inkscape plugin, can be compiled with:
make release
in the root of the project directory.
Python libraries
Once blastpit has been compiled, you can install the Python bindings to a local directory with:
make python
lmos-tray (using Wine)
lmos-tray needs to be built using Qt for Windows. This can be done on a Windows PC, a virtual machine, or using Wine.
The instructions below are for using Wine, although the initial setup detailed here is slightly laborious.
First, obtain the Windows version of Qt (an offline installer can be downloaded here).
You will need to install the Windows version of Qt into a 32-bit Wine installation. For some Linux distributions, this may require running the following installation commands from within a 32-bit chroot environment, the setting up of which is not covered here. Other Linux distributions may use a multilib version of Wine, and the chroot may not be needed.
These steps use a specific WINEPREFIX, which creates an isolated 32-bit Wine directory (modify the WINEPREFIX to a location of your choice):
export WINEPREFIX="${HOME}/.wine_32bit"
mkdir -p ${WINEPREFIX}
WINEARCH="win32" wine qt-opensource-windows-x86-5.14.2.exe
From the Qt installer components tree, choose 'MinGW 7.3.0 32-bit' and continue the installation.
If you have access to the Rofin VLM installation media then you can install VLM to the Wine directory, since the lmos ActiveX control will run under Wine. This can be useful for testing and development.
Once installed, you can compile the Win32 blastpit code from your normal development environment (not the 32-bit chroot, if you used one) with the following command, which uses zig to cross-compile:
make clean cross
Then (from within the 32-bit chroot, if necessary):
make lmosrelease
This will create a zip file in the /tmp directory, which will contain a portable version of lmos-tray, plus the Qt .dll files. This can be unzipped and executed on the target laser controller Windows PC.
Inkscape
The Inkscape plugins can be installed by copying them from the src/inkscape directory to your Inkscape plugins directory. For Linux, this is likely to be ${HOME}/.config/inkscape/extensions.
Please note that the plugins are developed using Inkscape version 1.0, so they may not work with earlier versions of Inkscape.
Usage
Currently, Blastpit is used solely to quickly convert Inkscape drawings into VLM files that can be opened and engraved from within VLM.
Firstly, start the WebSockets server running with:
wscli -s 8000
Then start lmos-tray on the Windows machine. Right-click on the tray icon, and choose 'Settings'. In the dialog box, enter the WebSockets address of the server started above, in the form ws://SERVER_IPV4_ADDRESS:PORT
If lmos-tray connects to the server correctly, then the tray icon should change and a balloon should indicate a successful connection.
Open the template 'laser.svg' from the src/inkscape directory. There are several text objects containing parameters for blastpit. The most important is the parameter 'server', which needs to be modified to the address of the WebSockets server above (the same address that is used by the lmos-tray program).
Once the Inkscape plugins are installed, there should be a new 'Laser' submenu in the Extensions menu. Selecting the 'Laser' option will attempt to send the current Inkscape drawing to the server. The default option is to save the drawing in the C:\Rofin\VisualLaserMarker\MarkingFiles folder.
Bugs
Yes. It doesn't work very well yet.
In addition, blastpit relies on the Rofin LMOS ActiveX control for its functionality, so any problems that affect it will also affect blastpit.
Copyright and Licencing
All original source code is released under the BSD Licence. All original text and graphic files are released under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain license.
Other non-original code is released under licenses stated within the files.
The LMOS ActiveX control is copyright Rofin Sinar Laser GmbH.
Sample video capture code is copyright IDS Imaging GmbH and is used with permission.
Boilerplate Qt application code is copyright Digia Plc and is released under the terms of the BSD license.
Boilerplate TeX code was obtained from https://www.latextemplates.com and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 unported licence.