Owen with his laser cutter

A Home Made Laser Cutter For $700

June 29, 2022 by 36 Comments

While some decent lasers are out there for under $400 USD, they tend to be a little small. What if you wanted something a little nicer but didn’t want to jump to the $2,000 category? The answer for [Owen Schafer] was to build it with parts he had lying around and a few strategic purchases.

While he was initially planning on using a diode laser, doing anything more than engraving is tricky. He purchased a cheap 40 W CO2 laser tube, but it meant that he needed water cooling, mirrors, and more complex stuff that a diode doesn’t need. The frame is aluminum extrusion held together with 3D printed plates. Given there was a powerful laser bouncing around with mirrors, a plywood box formed the enclosure.

The stepper controller is an Arduino Mega running the Marlaser firmware, though [Owen] admits perhaps a laser cutter-specific driver board would have been better as he spent many hours trying to get the Arduino to do what he wanted. Air ventilation is a tube with a fan that vents out a nearby window. Water cooling is just a bucket of water with a pump in it. A simple nylon hose connected to a compressor with a maximum airflow valve provides an air assist while cutting. Finally, we’re happy to report that [Owen] bought safety glasses specific to his laser to protect his eyes and researched how to ground the high voltages generated.

We particularly loved seeing all of [Owen’s] test cuts. He proudly displayed his boxes, sharks, and lamp shades like anyone with their new laser cutter is wont to do. If you’re looking to upgrade your laser, there’s an add-on for detecting materials optically or a relatively cheap laser bed you can throw in your laser.

Continue reading “A Home Made Laser Cutter For $700” →

Inside An EBay Marking Laser

June 11, 2022 by 13 Comments

When it comes to trolling eBay for cool stuff, some people have all the luck. Whereas all we ever seem to come across is counterfeit chips and obviously broken gear listed as, “good condition, powers on”, [Les Wright] actually managed to get more than he bargained for with one of his recent eBay purchases.

In his video teardown and tour of an industrial marking laser, [Les] suggests that he was really just in it for the optics — which is not a surprise, given his interest in optics in general and lasers in particular. The 20-W CO2 laser once etched barcodes and the like into products on assembly lines, but with a 2009 date code of its own, it was a safe bet that it was pitched due to a burned-out laser tube. But there were still high-quality IR optics and a precision X-Y galvanometer assembly to be harvested, so [Les] pressed on.

The laser itself ended up being built around a Synrad RF-stimulated CO2 tube. By a happy accident, [Les] found that the laser actually still works, at least most of the time. There appears to be an intermittent problem with the RF driver, but the laser works long enough to release the magic smoke from anything combustible that gets in its way. The galvos work too — [Les] was able to drive them with a Teensy and a couple of open-source libraries.

Galvos, lenses worth more than $800, and a working laser tube — not a bad haul. We’ll be following along to see what [Les] makes of this booty. Continue reading “Inside An EBay Marking Laser” →

High-Power Laser Salvaged From Headlights

February 17, 2022 by 55 Comments

[DiodeGoneWild]’s latest video lives up to the name. He takes apart a laser headlight to recover a pretty powerful blue laser. You can see the video, below.

The headlights work with blue laser diodes that excite phosphor to produce white light. Removing the outside trappings revealed a three-pin laser diode (the case is the third pin). There’s also a substantial heatsink. Removing the diode from the assembly is difficult, but it is easy enough to leave it in the heatsink and use the existing connector.

Of course, the phosphor and a filter have to go. Some destructive work with a screwdriver and pliers broke out the optics from a diode he’d destroyed trying to remove it. Then he replaced the optics on the remaining diode with the modified housing.

With a low-current test, the diode didn’t lase but did act as a regular LED. More current did the trick, though. The laser without the optics made a line rather than a spot but still had enough power to melt some plastic and light matches. To get a parallel beam, the internal lens needs to move closer to the diode, and a drill bit allowed that to happen, which reduced the beam’s divergence quite a bit, but didn’t create the best result.

With the proliferation of cheap laser modules, it is really worth scrapping a headlight? Maybe. But it is an interesting look inside of a modern headlight, either way. We’ve peeked inside these headlights before. Maybe you can turn those old headlights into an oven.

Continue reading “High-Power Laser Salvaged From Headlights” →

A 3D-printed mini laser engraver made from DVD-RW drive motors.

Mini Laser Engraver Could Carve Out A Place On Your Desk

October 2, 2021 by 11 Comments

Got a couple of old DVD-RW drives lying around, just collecting dust? Of course you do. If not, you likely know where to find a pair so you can build this totally adorable and fully dangerous laser engraver for your desk. Check out the complete build video after the break.

[Smart Tronix] doesn’t just tell you to salvage the stepper motors out of the drives — they show you how it’s done and even take the time to explain in writing what stepper motors are and why you would want to use them in this project, which is a remix of [maggie_shah]’s design over on Thingiverse. As you might expect, the two steppers are wired up to an Arduino Uno through a CNC shield with a pair of A4988 motor drivers. These form the two axes of movement — the 250mW laser is attached to x, and the platform moves back and forth on the y axis. We’d love to have one of these to mess around with. Nothing that fits on that platform would be safe! Just don’t forget the proper laser blocking safety glasses!

Need something much bigger that won’t take up a lot of space? Roll up your sleeves and build a SCARA arm to hold your laser.

Continue reading “Mini Laser Engraver Could Carve Out A Place On Your Desk” →

How Laser Headlights Work

March 22, 2021 by 142 Comments

When we think about the onward march of automotive technology, headlights aren’t usually the first thing that come to mind. Engines, fuel efficiency, and the switch to electric power are all more front of mind. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of engineers around the world working to improve the state of the art in automotive lighting day in, day out.

Sealed beam headlights gave way to more modern designs once regulations loosened up, while bulbs moved from simple halogens to xenon HIDs and, more recently, LEDs. Now, a new technology is on the scene, with lasers!

Continue reading “How Laser Headlights Work” →

Laser Galvos And An ESP32 Recreate Old-School Asteroids

February 18, 2021 by 21 Comments

Playing Asteroids now isn’t quite what it used to be when it came out 40 years ago. At the time, the vector-scan display was part of the charm; making do with an emulator running on a traditional raster display just doesn’t quite do it for purists. But if you manage to build your own laser-projector version of the game like [Chris G] did, you’re getting close to capturing some of the original magic of the game.

There’s a lot to unpack about this project, and the video below does a good job explaining it. Where the original game used a beam of electrons flashing inside a CRT to trace out each object in the game, [Chris] substituted an off-the-shelf two-axis galvanometer from eBay and a 5-mW laser LED. This can project a gamefield on a wall up to two meters on a side, far bigger than any version of the machine ever built. The galvos are driven by op-amp drivers and an SPI DAC on a custom PCB. And in comparison to the discrete logic chips and 6502 running the original game, [Chris] opted for an ESP32.

As interesting as the hardware for this is, the real story is in the software. [Chris] does an excellent job running through his design, making the bulk of the video feel like a master class in game programming. His software is from scratch — no emulations here. As such it doesn’t perfectly reproduce the original games — no flying saucers and no spaceship explosion animations (yet) — but when coupled with the laser vector display, it certainly captures the feel of the original.

Being devoted Asteroids fans from back in the day, this one really pushes our buttons. We’ve seen laser-based recreations of the game before, but this one makes us think we can finally afford to recapture the glory of our misspent youth.

Continue reading “Laser Galvos And An ESP32 Recreate Old-School Asteroids” →

Tiny Laser Cutter Puts Micro Steppers To Work

June 3, 2020 by 33 Comments

The influx of cheap laser cutters from China has been a boon to the maker movement, if at the cost of a lot of tinkering to just get the thing to work. So some people just prefer to roll their own, figuring that starting from scratch means you get exactly what you want. And apparently what [Mike Rankin] wanted was a really, really small laser cutter.

The ESP32 Burninator, as [Mike] lovingly calls his creation, is small enough to be in danger of being misplaced accidentally. The stage relies on tiny stepper-actuated linear drives, available on the cheap from AliExpress. The entire mechanical structure is two PCBs — a vertical piece that holds the ESP32, an OLED display, the X-axis motor, and the driver for the laser, which comes from an old DVD burner; a smaller bottom board holds the Y-axis and the stage. “Stage” is actually a rather grand term for the postage-stamp-sized working area of this cutter, but the video below shows that it does indeed cut black paper.

The cuts are a bit wonky, but this is surely to be expected given the running gear, and we like it regardless. It sort of reminds us of that resin 3D-printer small enough to fit in a Christmas ornament that [Sean Hodgins] did a while back. We’d suggest not trying to hang this on a tree, though.

Continue reading “Tiny Laser Cutter Puts Micro Steppers To Work” →