Cutting Metals With A Diode Laser?

September 21, 2022 by 34 Comments

Hobbyist-grade laser cutters can be a little restrictive as to the types and thicknesses of materials that they can cut. We’re usually talking about CO2 and diode-based machines here, and if you want to cut non-plastic sheets, you’re usually going to be looking towards natural materials such as leather, fabrics, and thin wood.

But what about metals? It’s a common beginner’s question, often asked with a resigned look, that they already know the answer is going to be a hard “no. ” However, YouTuber [Chad] decided to respond to some comments about the possibility of cutting metal sheets using a high-power diode laser, with a simple experiment to actually determine what the limits actually are.

Using an XTool D1 Pro 20W as a testbed, [Chad] tried a variety of materials including mild steel, stainless, aluminium, and brass sheets at a variety of thicknesses. Steel shim sheets in thicknesses from one to eight-thousandths of an inch appeared to be perfectly cuttable, with an appropriate air assist and speed settings, with thicker sheets needing a good few passes. You can definitely see the effect of excess heat in the workpiece, resulting in some discoloration and noticeable warping, but those issues can be mitigated. Copper and aluminium weren’t touched by the beam at all, likely due to the extra reflectivity, but we do have to wonder if appropriate surface treatments could improve matters.

Obviously, we’ve seen that diode lasers can have an impact on metals, simply smearing a little mustard on the workpiece seems to make marking a snap. Whilst we’re on the subject of diode lasers, you can get a lot of mileage from just strapping such a laser module onto a desktop CNC.

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Floppy Disk Sales Are Higher-Density Than You Might Think

September 21, 2022 by 52 Comments

Floppies may be big in Japan, but nostalgic and/or needful Stateside floppy enthusiasts needn’t fret — just use AOL keyword point that browser toward floppydisk.com. There, you can buy new floppies of all sizes, both new and old, recycle your disks, or send them in to get all that precious vintage stuff transferred off of them.

That delightfully Web 1.0 site is owned by Tom Persky, who fancies himself the ‘last man standing in the floppy disk business’. Who are we to argue? By the way, Tom has owned that address since approximately 1990 — evidently that’s when a cyber-squatter offered up the domain for $1,000, and although Tom scoffed at paying so much as $1 for any URL, his wife got the checkbook out, and he has had her to thank for it ever since.

My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It’s shocking to me. — Tom Persky

In the course of writing a book all about yours-truly’s favorite less-than-rigid medium, authors Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar sat down to talk with Tom about what it’s like to basically sell buggy whips in the age of the electric car.

Tom also owns diskduper.com, which is where he got his start with floppies — by duplicating them. In the 80s and 90s, being in this business was a bit like cranking out legal tender in the basement. As time wore on and more companies stopped selling floppies or simply went under, the focus of Tom’s company shifted away from duplication and toward sales. Whereas the business was once 90% duplication and 10% floppy sales, in 2022, those percentages have flopped places, if you will.

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It’s Pi All The Way Down With This Pi-Powered Pi-Picking Robot

September 20, 2022 by 14 Comments

While most of us live in a world where the once ubiquitous Raspberry Pi is now as rare as hens’ teeth, there’s a magical place where they’ve got so many Pis that they needed to build a robotic dispenser to pick Pi orders. And to add insult to injury, they even built this magical machine using a Raspberry Pi. The horror.

This magical place? Australia, of course. There’s no date posted on the Pi Australia article linked above, but it does mention that there’s a Pi 4 Model B running the show, so that makes it at least recent-ish. Stock is stored in an array of tilted bins that a shuttle mechanism accesses via an X-Y gantry. The shuttle docks in front of a bin and uses a stepper-controlled finger to flip a box over the lip holding them in its bin. Once in the shuttle, the order is transported to an array of output bins, where a servo operates a flap to unceremoniously dump the product out for packing and shipping. There’s a video of a full cycle below, but a word of warning — the stepper motors on the X-Y gantry really scream, so you might want to lower the volume.

The article goes into more detail on not only the construction of “Bishop” — named after the heroic synthetic organism from Aliens — but also the challenges faced during construction. It turns out that even when you try to use gravity to simplify a system like this, things can go awry very easily. There’s also a fair bit of detail on the software, which surprisingly centers around LinuxCNC. And there are plans to take this further, with another bot to do the packing, sealing, and labeling of the order. If they need all that automation down there, we guess we found all the missing Pis.

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Ride-on Star Wars Land Speeder Gets A Real Jet Engine

September 20, 2022 by 11 Comments

When it comes to children’s ride-on toys, the Star Wars Land Speeder is one of the cooler examples out there. However, with weedy 12-volt motors, they certainly don’t move quickly. [Joel Creates] decided to fix all that, hopping up his land speeder with a real jet engine.

First, the original drivetrain was removed, with new wheels installed underneath. Initially, it was set up with the front wheels steering, while the rear wheels were left to caster freely. A RC jet engine was installed in the center engine slot on the back of the land speeder, and was controlled via a standard 2-channel RC transmitter.

The jet engine worked, but the wheel configuration led to the speeder simply doing donuts. With the speeder reconfigured with rear wheels locked in place, the speeder handled much more predictably. Testing space was limited to a carpark, so high-speed running was out of the question. However, based on the limited testing achieved, it looks as though the speeder would be capable of a decent clip with the throttle maxed out.

It’s not a practical build, but it sure looks like a fun one. [Joel Creates] has big dreams of adding two more jet engines and taking it out to a runway for high-speed testing, and that’s something we’d love to see.

RC jet engines are a bit of a YouTube fad right now, showing up on everything from RC cars to Teslas. Video after the break.

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Open Source: Free As The Air You Breathe

September 20, 2022 by 18 Comments

[Carolyn Barber] recently interviewed a 15-year-old who has been making Corsi-Rosenthal boxes for people in his community that are at risk for COVID. Not only is it great that a teenager has such community spirit, but it is also encouraging that [Richard Corsi] and [Jim Rosenthal] made an open-source design that can help people at a greatly reduced cost.

If you haven’t seen one of these boxes, it is essentially a box fan inside a cardboard box with MERV-13 filters on all sides. While these high-quality filters aren’t as efficient as HEPA filters, the box makes up for it by moving a prodigious amount of air and by being much less expensive. The article says you can build a unit for $60 to $100, which is considerably cheaper than other filters with similar performance.

There’s been at least one research paper on the efficacy of the filters and the results were generally quite positive. Schools are taking a great interest in these boxes because they are inexpensive and effective. Of course, the filters don’t last forever, but one of the creators estimates in a classroom with 25 students, a three-year run of the box would run about $4.46 per student per year. Not a lot to pay for clean air.

We love hearing about tech helping people and especially open source that makes big impacts. Usually, when we think of air filtering, we are thinking about laser cutters or 3D printers. However, we have seen inexpensive HEPA filters, too.

3D Printing Aids Metal Polishing

September 20, 2022 by 9 Comments

While a machinist can put a beautiful finish on a piece of metal with their lathe or mill, to achieve the ultimate finish, a further set of polishing procedures are necessary. Successively finer abrasives are used in a process called lapping, which removes as far as possible any imperfections and leaves eventually a mirrored smoothness. It’s not without problems though, particularly at the edge of a piece it can result in rounded-off corners as the abrasive rubs over them. [Adam the machinist] has a solution, and he’s found it with a 3D printer.

To avoid the rounded edges, the solution involves fitting a piece of metal or wood flush with the surface to be lapped, such that the pressure doesn’t act upon the corner. This can be inconvenient, and the solution avoids it by 3D printing a custom piece that fits over the entire machined object providing a flat surface surrounding the edges. We see it being used with a demonstration piece that has three separate surfaces in the same plane to lap,something that would have been challenging without the 3D printed aid.

Lapping isn’t a process we see too often here. But it has cropped up as an extreme overclocking technique.

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Glass 3D Printing Via Laser

September 19, 2022 by 5 Comments

If you haven’t noticed, diode laser engraver/cutters have been getting more powerful lately. [Cranktown City] was playing with an Atomstack 20 watt laser and wondered if it would sinter sand into glass. His early experiments were not too promising, but with some work, he was able to make a crude form of glass with the laser as the source of power. However, using glass beads was more effective, so he decided to build his own glass 3D printer using the laser.

This isn’t for the faint of heart. Surfaces need to be flat and there’s aluminum casting and plasma cutting involved, although some of it may not have been necessary for the final construction. The idea was to make a system that would leave a layer of sand and then put down a new layer on command. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult.

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