Driver update
It appears my Windows 10 environment is not acting the same as my laptop and I believe it is because I have an ubunto special feature on the desktop. A little debugging in the script showed that a display of ports after port = self.serial_ports() on the laptop shows all 256 ports but on the desktop there are no ports shown. I replaced the port = self.serial_ports() with port = 'COM4' and now I can write to the K40.
First thing we need to do is to identify the USB com port (serial id or vendor id) and see if that matches ST.com, if not that the search routine should move on to the next com port until it finds a match on the id. Fairly simple and will look into it when I have some more time.
Thanks heap, Paul
The raster2laser code is fine - it's my machine that's bad. something on the machine is preventing the code that works on my other machines from finding the list of port names so the code will never find the K40. The to do is on my end - the mini and plugins are not at fault.