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Hey Matt,
I do some laser engraving/cutting but use around a 3W diode, so I’m guessing you’re using a 40W CO2 which can cut a lot more stuff. The key trick is using the M3/M5 commands for spindle on/off to instead trigger your laser. There’s also the other trick of controlling an Arduino in parallel to the TinyG movements. This trick additionally uses the Z axis value to decide when to turn the laser on/off instead of M3/M5 (this can create the ability to use more Gcode workflow tools to generate your laser commands). You can see how I’m doing it in the laser soldering video with TinyG. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2h7hagVfnA
If you need super fine toggling of the laser for imprinting images that is a tougher problem as you have to sync the TinyG moves and the laser toggling at a super high rate. I think this could be done by soldering to the “step” pin on the A axis (or other) and setting the TinyG steps/mm to be your toggle setting, i.e. if you want to toggle the laser on/off 1000 times per second and your feedrate is 1mm/sec you can get 1000 on/off’s per mm. Then you have to figure out how to setup the A axis correctly for the correct steps to correspond to your engraving. If this is your approach you could create a widget in ChiliPeppr and a new workspace where you drop-in that widget that intercepts the Gcode, calculates the A axis value, and the rewrites the Gcode.
-John
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