After carefully checking the cutter ( Tales of a Cheap Chinese Laser cutter – Pre-Checks) It was time to sort out the software.
The software comes on a DVD there are three types of installation guide on the DVD. Ones in Chinese. Ones that are unreadable, and ones in English, that don’t mention software at all. So guessing was the way forward…
The software comes as a pair of plugins for Corel Draw. If you have Corel draw 12 or above, you should be fine. If not there is an instalation of CorelDraw12 on the disk I’m not sure if this has been pirated. I have seen legit older copies of CorelDraw shipped with scanners in the past and there is no way to find out.
The CorelDraw12 comes as a RAR file. For this to work it needs to be extracted to the root of a drive, so either to a DVD, or Memory Stick and installed from there. If you have had any earlier copies of CorelDraw on the machine, you need to uninstall it (and ideally clean the files and registry) before trying the install. If you don’t the plugins will report Version >11 not found.
The Two plugins are called CorelLaser and CorelDRW. These two need to be installed with Administrator privileges
When they are correctly installed CorelLaser will appear in the system tray, and CorelDRW will appear as a plugin in Corel Draw.
in CorelLaser you will need to set the model number of the driver board, this can be found on the driver board PCB. The dongle also needs to be plugged in. The dongle uses a USB serial driver, there are drivers on the disk, but these didn’t work for me. Luckily after removing the USB device in device manager and re-inserting the dongle WIN7 detected and downloaded the drivers itself.
Then just for fun my laptop (not been used for years) decided to install all the windows updates from the last couple of years, I cant blame the cutter for this, but it did mean that in total with all of the dead ends I’d been down software wise, It took me just less then 10 hours to install the software. 🙁
To Be Continued in Tales of a cheap Chinese laser cutter – Lasering!