Title says it all - I've been playing around with a 2.5W laser I got off eBay and wanted to do a little laser engraving. So I mounted (and by "mounted" I mean used a clamp and simply clamped it) on my CNC machine and wrote a program to engrave a dragon.

At first I plugged and unplugged the laser to turn it off during the moves. But this post is about how I achieved control from Mach3 to turn it on and off.

Planning ahead I wired an outlet to a relay board suited for 100vac - I figured I'd be able to use it to turn on and off my router as well - why not :)

Then I used output 16 on the HobbyCNC Pro board and also pulled 5v from the HobbyCNC Pro board to power the relay board as well - pretty easy wiring really