Sometimes you just gotta sit down and hack something together. Forget the CAD and the cool software toys; just hammer away until you have something working. That’s how [bobricus] ended up with this cute little laser engraver anyway.
For under $300 US of parts and a few nights working in his pajamas, the aptly named, pajama micro laser engraver is a pretty nice little machine for its class. Not having the space for a full size machine and not necessarily needing its capabilities he aimed to produce something compact.
The frame is aluminium extrusion, the movement is core-XY an H-bot on linear rails, and it appears to just be a grbl board with a Chinese laser module on it. He took a bit of care to make the frame a cube which allows him to easily vent the fumes from the little unit. There’s even a small air pump to blow the off-gas from the cutting away from the laser.
All in all a nice little hack useful for all sorts of things from solder masks to cutting wood veneers. You can see it zipping around in the video after the break.
Surely there is some words missing in the title. It makes no sense. Maybe “DESIGNED /AND/ HACKED” would make more sense …
My guess would be someone started off phrasing it as “designed” and changed their mind to “hacked” but forgot to delete the “designed” part? “A CNC HACKED TOGETHER IN PAJAMAS” sounds more right than what we got.
Hmm…
Another one of those open-frame laser engravers.
Hopefully his remaining eye will be good enough to allow him to build an enclosure.
no, it is fully closed and shielded with fume extraction, check pictures on project page
Cool beans, but that’s actually H-bot, not C
orexy.
pretty cool you can pretty much just slap together some CNC parts bought from ebay and have a working system!
More like under $200. Not really a hack lol. You can slap a laser on any cheap 3D printer for pretty cheap.
This could get a bit scarey depending on his choice of sleep wear :lol:
It’s an H-Bot layout, not CoreXY. And the way that the belts don’t run parallel (belt idlers are too large opposite the motors) will lead to changes in belt tension, inaccuracy and racking. See your own article on the subject: https://hackaday.com/2016/02/29/design-analysis-core-xy-vs-h-bot/
Thanks for the correction!
I don’t see any build details…