Update: What You See Is What You Laser Cut

August 26, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 41 Comments

If there’s one thing about laser cutters that makes them a little difficult to use, it’s the fact that it’s hard for a person to interact with them one-on-one without a clunky computer in the middle of everything. Granted, that laser is a little dangerous, but it would be nice if there was a way to use a laser cutter without having to deal with a computer. Luckily, [Anirudh] and team have been working on solving this problem, creating a laser cutter that can interact directly with its user.

The laser cutter is tied to a visual system which watches for a number of cues. As we’ve featured before, this particular laser cutter can “see” pen strokes and will instruct the laser cutter to cut along the pen strokes (once all fingers are away from the cutting area, of course). The update to this system is that now, a user can import a drawing from a smartphone and manipulate it with a set of physical tokens that the camera can watch. One token changes the location of the cut, and the other changes the scale. This extends the functionality of the laser cutter from simply cutting at the location of pen strokes to being able to cut around any user-manipulated image without interacting directly with a computer. Be sure to check out the video after the break for a demonstration of how this works.

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Hot-Wire CNC Foam Cutter From E Waste

August 24, 2015 by Kevin Dady 3 Comments

A couple of old DVD ROM drives and a compact photo printer is fairly standard fare at the thrift store, but what do you do with them? Hack them up to make a CNC foam cutter of course!

[Jonah] started with a couple LITE-ON brand DVD RW drives, which use stepper motors instead of plain old DC motors. This is a huge score since steppers make accurate positioning possible. With the internal frames removed, threaded rod and nuts were used to hold the two units parallel to each other forming the Z axis.

The feed mechanism from a Canon compact photo printer was then bolted onto the bottom to form the Y axis. Add a bit of nichrome wire for the cutting element (this can be found in old hair dryers) onto where the laser assembly of the DVD rom once lived, and you have the mechanics done.

Control is handled by an Arduino and some easy-driver modules to interface with the steppers. G-Code is generated by CamBam, which handles various cad files, or has its own geometry editor.

This is a fantastic way to get your feet wet in several ways; Cracking things open to harvest parts, driving steppers with simple micocontrollers, modeling and generating g-code, etc. The one issue we see with this build is a chicken-or-egg problem since you need to have a cube of foam cut down to somewhat strict dimensions before it will fit in this cutter. But we suppose that is really just an iterative design problem.

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Build A Baby Plasma Cutter–Right Now!

August 6, 2015 by Al Williams 43 Comments

What hacker doesn’t want a plasma cutter? Even if you aren’t MacGyver, you can probably build this one in a few minutes using things you have on hand. The catch? You probably can’t cut anything more than tin foil with it, and it is probably more a carbon-air arc gouger (which uses plasma) than a true plasma cutter. Still, as [Little Shop of Physics] shows on the video, it does a fine job of slicing right through foil.

If you are like us, you are back now after getting four 9V batteries, some tin foil, a pencil lead, and some clip leads and trying it. If you have more self-restraint than we do, you might want to think about what you are going to put the tin foil over. In the video, they used a laundry basket and a rubber band, but anything that keeps the foil suspended would do the trick.

Although it isn’t really a practical plasma cutter, we were thinking about strapping something like this to a 3D printer and cutting foil stencils. The jagged edges on the video are, hopefully, more from being operated by hand and less from the jagged mini-lightning bolt vaporizing the foil.

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DIY Punch Card System Despite Hanging Chads

July 30, 2015 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

Sometimes you just have parts lying around and want to make something out of them. [Tymkrs] had a robot paper cutter, so naturally they made punch cards. But then, of course, they needed a punch card reader, so they made one of those too. All with stuff lying around the shop.

The Silhouette Portrait paper cutter is meant for scrapbooking, but what evokes memories of the past more than punchcards? To cut out their data, rather than cute kittens or flowers, they wrote some custom code to turn ASCII characters into rows of dots. And the cards are done — you just have to clean up the holes that didn’t completely cut. These are infamously known as hanging chads.

The reader is made up of a block of wood, with a gap for the cards and perpendicular holes drilled for LEDs and photoresistors. This is cabled to a Propeller dev board with some simple firmware. We would have used photodiodes or phototransistors, because that’s what’s in our junk box (and because they have faster reaction time), but when you’ve got lemons, make lemonade.

OK, now that you’ve got a punch card reader and writer, what do you do with it? Password storage comes to mind.

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A Handheld CNC Router

July 26, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

Over the last few years, the state of the art in handheld routers has been tucked away in the back of our minds. It was at SIGGRAPH in 2012 and we caught up to it at Makerfair last year. Now, it’s getting ready for production.

Originally called Taktia, the Shaper router looks a lot like a normal, handheld router. This router is smart, though, with the ability to look at a work piece marked with a tape designed for computer vision and slightly reposition the cutter in response to how the user is moving it. A simple description doesn’t do this tool justice, so check out the video the Shaper team recently uploaded.

With the user moving the Shaper router over a work piece and motors moving the cutter head, this tool is able to make precision cuts – wooden gears and outlines of the United States – quickly, easily, and accurately. Cutting any shape is as easy as loading a file into Shaper, calling that file up on a touch screen display, and turning on the cutter. Move the router around the table, and the Shaper takes care of the rest.

Accuracy, at least in earlier versions, is said to be on the order of a hundredth of an inch. That’s good enough for wood, like this very interesting bit of joinery that would be pretty hard with traditional tools. Video below.

Thanks [martin] for the tip.

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Hardware Store CNC Machine Is Remarkably Precise

July 22, 2015 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

A vise, a hacksaw and file, some wrenches – the fanciest tools [HomoFaciens] uses while building his DIY hardware store CNC machine (YouTube link) are a drill press and some taps. And the bill of materials for this surprisingly precise build is similarly modest: the X- and Y-axes ride on cheap bearings that roll on steel tube stock and aluminum angles; drives are threaded rods with homemade encoders and powered by small brushed DC gear motors; and the base plate appears to be a scrap of ping-pong table. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino and four H-bridges.

The first accuracy tests using a ball point pen for tooling are quite impressive. [HomoFaciens] was able to draw concentric circles eyeball-accurate to within a few tenths of a millimeter, and was able to show good repeatability in returning to a point from both directions on both the X- and Y-axis. After the pen tests, he shows off a couple of other hardware store tooling options for the Z-axis – a Proxxon rotary tool with a burr for engraving glass; a soldering iron for cutting styrofoam; and a mini-router that works well enough to cut some acrylic gears.

We’re impressed by this build, which demonstrates that you don’t need a fancy shop to build a CNC machine. If you’re getting the itch to jump into the shallow end of the CNC pool, check out some of the builds we’ve featured before, like this PVC CNC machine, or this $250 build.

[Thanks, ThunderSqueak]

Desktop CNC From Hardware Parts Really Makes The Cut

July 22, 2015 by Kevin Dady 20 Comments

We love shop made CNC mills, so when [joekutz] tipped us off about the desktop sized CNC he just completed, we had to take a look. Each axis slides around on ball bearing drawer slides, and the machine itself is constructed with MDF and aluminum. And the results it produces are fantastic.

The machine’s work area weighs in at 160*160mm with a height of 25mm. Its the table is moved around with a pair of NEMA17 motors and M8 stainless steel threaded rods. Motor control is done with a pair of Arduino’s but they also do double duty with one processing G-code while the other handles the keypad and LCD interface.

The business end is a Proxxon rotary tool whizzing up to 2000RPM, and while [joekutz] hasn’t tried it on soft metals like brass or aluminum, he has successfully cut and engraved wood, plastics and copper clad PCB material.

Be sure to join us after the break for some YouTube videos. [joe] has posted three of a planned five-part-series which aren’t linked to in the project page shown above. to see this machine in action and get a rundown how it all works

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