When is new laser expected to be running?

I don’t see any new updates on Pearl. When is this laser going to be working and when will the training schedule be available. On 9/13 the message on the laser thread said it would be ready ‘almost immediately’. I am extremely worried about being able to cut my materials. Last week I spent 4 hours on Blue and had to do 3 passes on my wood file.

Pearl is waiting on the exhaust and PC workstation setup. @Jon is the lead on those aspects AFAIK

Pearl is slated for upgrade to a new controller under the Lightburn toolchain which has some great new capabilities. Its interface is somewhat more complex to control that, but not too intimidating. That will of course change the training, but the Lightburn toolchain will be common to Pearl and Tarkin so this will likely be done as a combined class

As Pearl is configured now, once the exhaust and workstation made ready, since this is a ULS machine its driver is functionally equivalent to Blue in almost every respect. The layout of the driver GUI is different though, it’s mostly a cosmetic difference and interpreting the fields from the way Blue works should be mostly intuitive. I’m recommending we just give Blue users a cheat sheet, I think that’s sufficient until we upgrade to the new controller. I think creating a new class for the existing ULS controller on Pearl and scheduling the user base to take it is not necessary.

That’s assuming we’re talking about regular cutting/engraving. Using the rotary function would be a slightly different discussion, although it’s not complicated at all.

@EricP is also working on exhaust. PC setup is something we could use a volunteer to help with. I believe Eric’s plan with Pearl is to provide a cheatsheet of sorts for those who are already laser trained. Rotary will not be an option initially until there are classes set up. The default for Pearl will remain flatbed for the time being, so once there are classes for the rotary (teachers needed) part of that will be putting it back to flatbed when done using rotary. There should not be any controller modifications done to Pearl until after Tarkin is online and available for members to book.