Laser Hacks

632 Articles

Laser Projector Relies On Steppers Rather Than Galvanometers

November 2, 2022 by 28 Comments

Laser light shows have always been real crowd-pleasers. There’s just something about the frenetic movement of a single point of intensely bright light making fluid animations that really captures the imagination. Large-scale laser shows require a lot of gear, of course, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get in on the fun yourself using something like this homebrew X-Y laser projector.

This is actually [Stanley]’s second pass at a stepper-based DIY projector; we featured his previous build back in 2016. This time around, he wanted to move beyond the “module mix-and-match” style of construction, so rather than use an Arduino and stepper shield, he rolled his own controller PCB to hold an ESP32 and a pair of STSPIN220 stepper drivers. The business end of the new version saw improvements, too — given that he was seeing unwanted softening of corners and curving of straight lines in the first projector’s images, he opted for smaller steppers holding smaller mirrors this time around. There’s also a new 3D printed chassis to hold everything, simplifying the build and keeping the two mirrors in better alignment.

The video below has the build details and some nice footage of the projector in action — it’s hard to go wrong with lasers and smoke. The performance seems pretty good, so the improvements seem to have paid off. And for those of you tapping out your “Should have used galvos” comments below, relax; [Stanley] says he’s thinking about ways to make his own galvanometers for the next version.

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A hand holding a paper cup pours orange resin into a mold. There are several different colors in a spiral inside a circular mold on a circular platform with holes around its perimeter sitting on a wooden table.

Reproducing Vinyl Records In Resin

November 1, 2022 by 9 Comments

While most are just plain, vinyl records can be found in a variety of colors, shapes, and some even glow in the dark. [Evan and Katelyn] decided to spruce up a plain old record by replicating it in bright, glow-in-the-dark resin.

By first making a silicone mold of the vinyl record and then pouring several different colors of resin into the resulting mold, [Evan and Katelyn] were able to make a groovy-looking record that still retained the texture necessary to transmit the original sounds of the record. The resulting piece has some static, but the music is still identifiable. That said, audiophiles would probably prefer to leave this up on the wall instead of in their phonograph.

Acrylic rings were laser cut and bolted together to build the form for the silicone mold with the original record placed at the bottom. To prevent bubbles, the silicone was degassed in a vacuum chamber before pouring over the record and the resin was cured in a pressure pot after pouring into the resulting mold.

If you’re interested in how records were originally made, check out this installment of Retrotechtacular. A more practical application of resin might be this technique to reproduce vintage plastic parts.

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Fiber Laser Your Way To Flexible PCB Success!

October 26, 2022 by 10 Comments

It’s not often we feel that something we’re featuring is a genuinely new and groundbreaking technique, but a team from the University of Maryland’s Small Artifacts Lab may have done just that with their foldable and flexible PCBs created using a fiber laser engraver.

Laser engraving a PCB is nothing new, but they’ve taken a custom PCB material made using Kapton tape and copper foil, and fine-tuned the engraver to not only selectively remove copper, but also to create in-place folds in the Kapton substrate. They have even used the laser to melt solder paste and solder components, though we’re not so convinced about the quality as seen in the video below the break. This means that they can not only create 3-dimensional PCB sculptures but also useful structures such as their example of an all-PCB micro switch. To make things easy they’ve even created a custom CAD package for designing in this medium.

Perhaps best of all, there appears to be nothing here that couldn’t be also performed outside the lab by anyone with enough Kapton and copper, and a fiber laser. We’re looking forward to where this technique will go. If you’re interested, you can read their paper here.

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Laser Engraving, Up Close

October 15, 2022 by 11 Comments

You know you aren’t supposed to watch your laser while it is cutting or engraving. But [Alex] hosted Wired in his studio and showed them how lasers engrave metal with a fiber laser. You can see the video below.

If you haven’t used a fiber laser, you might be surprised that while a 60 W model can burn metal, it does absolutely nothing to [Alex’s] hand. We wouldn’t try that, by the way, with the common diode lasers you see in most hacker’s labs these days. The video isn’t terribly technical, but it is interesting to see different metals succumb to the powerful laser. There are a few tips about marking different metals in different ways and how to deal with thermal expansion and other effects.

Fiber lasers aren’t as common as diode engravers in private shops, but we assume it is just a matter of time before they get cheaper. Not to mention their widespread use commercially means surplus units might become available, too.

If you are interested in lasers, [Alex’s] YouTube channel has quite a few interesting videos to check out. If you need more power, how’s 200 kW? Then again, even 20 W will get you something useful.

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$60 Laser Makes The Cut With New Controller

October 5, 2022 by 32 Comments

If you are reading the Lightburn forums, you probably already have a laser cutter of some kind.  But, if you are like most of us, you can always be tempted into another “deal.” [Dkj4linux] has a post where he bought a $79 laser engraver  (now selling for between $59 and $65, we noticed). Like most of these cheap engravers, the machine takes a proprietary controller with Windows-only software. No surprise that [Dkj4linux] would want to use…um… Linux. The answer? Rip the board out and replace it with an old spare.

The machine looks well constructed, as you can see in the video below. For that price, you get a 3-watt laser head (that is likely way less than that in terms of optical power), and a build area of 220x290mm. The controller was in a small metal enclosure, and it was easy to simply unplug the two axis and the laser control cable.

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Laser Zaps Cockroaches Over One Meter

October 3, 2022 by 40 Comments

You may have missed this month’s issue of Oriental Insects, in which a project by [Ildar Rakhmatulin] Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh caught our attention. [Ildar] led a team of researchers in the development of an AI-controlled laser that neutralizes moving cockroaches at distances of up to 1.2 meters. Noting the various problems using chemical pesticides for pest control, his team sought out a non-conventional approach.

The heart of the pest controller is a Jetson Nano, which uses OpenCV and Yolo object detection to find the cockroaches and galvanometers to steer the laser beam. Three different lasers were used for testing, allowing the team to evaluate a range of wavelengths, power levels, and spot sizes. Unsurprisingly, the higher power 1.6 W laser was most efficient and quicker.

The project is on GitHub (here) and the cockroach machine learning image set is available here. But [Ildar] points out in the conclusion of the report, this is dangerous. It’s suitable for academic research, but it’s not quite ready for general use, lacking any safety features. This report is full of cockroach trivia, such as the average speed of a cockroach is 4.8 km/h, and they run much faster when being zapped. If you want to experiment with cockroaches yourself, a link is provided to a pet store that sells the German Blattela germanica that was the target of this report.

If this project sounds familiar, it is because it is an improvement of a previous project we wrote about last year which used similar techniques to zap mosquitoes.

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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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