I got a K40 laser cutter from eBay and am trying to install K40 whisperer on Ubuntu Focal Fossa, spent about 8 hours yesterday wrestling with it now I surrender. I have seen a post from a few years back saying it doesn't work on Ubuntu but have seen others saying they have it working.

I have downloaded the software from Scorch Works and been following the read me file in the zip explaining installation on Linux.

Setting up K40whisperer on Linux (by Dr. med. Jan Schiefer):

Requirements

Prerequirements:

• python
• unzip
• udev
• inkscape

xxxx --version gives:

Python 2.7.18rc1
UnZip 6.00 of 20 April 2009, by Debian. Original by Info-ZIP.
Inkscape 0.92.5
udev command not found

But I have udev installed it so I assume this command just don't work with udev

Instructions

1. Create a group for the users who are allowed to use the laser cutter: sudo groupadd lasercutter

2. Add your yourself to this group, replace [YOUR USERNAME] with your unix username: sudo usermod -a -G lasercutter [YOUR USERNAME]

3. Eventually add other users who will use the laser cutter to the group

4. Plug in your laser cutter to your computer

5. Create a udev control file four your laser cutter as root (i will use gedit in this example): sudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/97-ctc-lasercutter.rules

   Put the following text into the file and replace [VENDOR ID] and [PRODUCT ID] with the information you obtained from lsusb:SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1a86", ATTRS{idProduct}=="5512", ENV{DEVTYPE}=="usb_device", MODE="0664", GROUP="lasercutter"

lsusb gave me the same values for vendor id and product id

Now save the file.

6. Reboot your computer!

7. Download and the K40whisperer source code, for example "K40_Whisperer-0.07_src.zip"

8. Unzip the source code, for example: unzip K40_Whisperer-0.07_src.zip -d /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/

9. Go to the K40 whisperer source directory, for example: cd /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/K40_Whisperer-0.07_src/

10. Install the requires python packages using the following commands:

    pip install lxml
    pip install pyusb
    pip install pillow
    pip install pyclipper

I had issues with this and had to use pip3 install xxxx to get it to work but have since used sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/pip pip /usr/bin/pip3 1 which seems to have cleared that issue.

11. Run K40whisperer: python ./k40_whisperer.py

when I run that command I get this:

:~/Downloads/K40_Whisperer-0.52_src$ python ./k40_whisperer.py
Unable to load USB library (Sending data to Laser will not work.)
Traceback (most recent call last): File "./k40_whisperer.py", line 28, in <module> from svg_reader import SVG_READER File "/home/dot/Downloads/K40_Whisperer-0.52_src/svg_reader.py", line 35, in <module> from PIL import Image
ImportError: No module named PIL

I have seen posts saying the PIL error is related to out of date pip which is what lead me to updating pip which didn't seem to work, and sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/pip pip /usr/bin/pip3 1

I'm still very new to Linux so I'm just doing what I'm told really rather than having any understanding of what/why I'm doing it.

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