Hack a Day » engraver

BAMF2011: Lasersaur is one BIG laser cutter!

Phil Burgess — Sun, 22 May 2011 22:15:08 +0000

Psst…wanna buy a laser cutter, but not ready to sell your internal organs? Nortd Labs’ Lasersaur project aims to create an open source large-format laser cutter/engraver that undercuts (har har!) the cost of commercial models by an order of magnitude.

A Lasersaur built strictly using componentry from the globally-available bill of materials will set you back about $5,000. But if you can source some of the parts locally…or better yet, if you have a knack for scrounging (the stepper motors, for example, are common in junked inkjet printers)…it may be possible to knock that down by a grand or more. That’s still a big chunk of change for the lone garage tinkerer…but for schools or hackerspaces, or anyone who can pool some labor and funding, this could make laser work a lot more practical. Entry-level commercial models can be had for similar cost, but these are tiny in comparison — Lasersaur’s cutting bed is an enormous 140 by 72 centimeters!

Aside from bringing down the cost, another goal of the project is to break from the Windows/Corel hegemony that’s been the rule with most commercial laser platforms. Lasersaur’s “brain” is Arduino-based and cross-platform by nature. The hardware is interfaced through a custom motor control shield, easily assembled with all through-hole components.

The Lasersaur project is currently in a closed alpha stage, with the aim of a fully documented 1.0 open source release this summer. Project contributors have early access to the design documents and software, if you’re eager to get crackin’.

Filed under: cnc hacks, laser hacks

Buying a Laser Cutter From China

Jesse Congdon — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:47:37 +0000

We here at Hackaday have been pining over these cheap laser cutters on the e-bay. They are, however, just outside of the price range to make them worth ponying up for. [Stephen Hobley] however seems to have taken one for the team in his three part series, and is allowing us to live vicariously through is experiences.

Not surprisingly the price point leads to the potential for headaches. The units ship directly from China, and see their fair share of rough handling from package carriers. Broken/misaligned laser tubes are not uncommon (replacement tubes are prevalent). Shockingly the laser tube managed to survive the seven thousand mile journey! That only leaves a couple crucial modifications and careful cleaning and aligning to get the unit up and running. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?

To top off all the modifications adjustments and cleaning steps [Stephen] found (in part three) that his controller board was on the fritz. With a new one on the way from China, [Stephen] is debating either reverse engineering the included controller board or coming up with his own CNC solution. We could suggest quite a few alternate solutions ourselves.

We will be glued to [Stephen]‘s blog for updates.

Stick around for a video of what we all really want to see, a laser burning stuff.

Filed under: tool hacks

Bench-top laser engraver does some cutting too

Mike Szczys — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 21:00:07 +0000

Grab that stack of old optical drives you have in the corner and get to work building this laser engraver. [Groover] is taking a no-nonsense approach to the build and we think it is just simple enough to be accessible to a very wide audience.

The physical assembly uses sleds from two optical drives. These are mounted some angle bracket. Since lasers cut at one specific focal length, there is not need for a Z axis (simplifying the build greatly). In fact, we think the hardest part of the assembly is retrieving the laser diode from a DVD-R drive and packaging it for use with this setup.

The electronics are a combination of a couple of consumer products. Two pre-fab motor drivers are used to command the stepper motors on the optical sleds. These receive their commands from an Arduino. A package called GRBL reads in G-code ([Groover] shows how to generate this from Inkscape) and in turn sends commands to the Arduino.

The results are quite remarkable. It can engrave wood with great resolution and contrast. The video after the break even shows it cutting out shapes from construction paper. Now we still want our own full-size laser cutter, but this project is much more fiscally possible for us.

Filed under: cnc hacks, laser hacks

CNC wood router

Eliot — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 06:30:00 +0000

[GlacialWanderer] has published the first pictures from his CNC machine build. It’s a three axis gantry style machine that he intends to route and engrave wood with. He’s posted a detailed cost breakdown: $1800. He estimates spending 30 hours researching on sites like CNCzone. The build time for the mechanical side was around 50 hours. The electrical system hasn’t been hoooked up yet, so look for that in a future post. It looks like an incredible machine already, so we can’t wait to see what’s next.