Wii-Motified Laser Cutter Refocuses For Contoured Cutting

November 1, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 11 Comments

Still laser cutting all of your parts in 2D? Not the folks over at [Just Add Sharks]. With a few lines of code and an in-tact Wii-Mote, they’ve managed to rig their laser cutter to dynamically refocus based on the height of the material.

The hack is cleanly executed by placing the Wii-Mote both at a known fixed distance-and-angle and within line-of-sight of the focused beam. Thankfully, the image-processing is already done onboard by the Wii-Mote’s image sensor, which simply returns the (x,y) coordinates of the four brightest IR points in view. As the beam moves over the material, the dot moves up or down in the camera’s field-of-view, triggering a refocus of the laser as it cuts. Given that the z-axis table needs to readjust with the contour, the folks at [Just Add Sharks] have slowed down the cutting speed. Finally, it’s worth noting that the Wii-Mote was designed to detect IR LEDs, not a 10600-nanometer laser beam, but we suspect that the Wii-Mote is receiving colors produced by the fluorescing material itself, not the beam. Nevertheless, the result is exactly the same–a dynamically refocusing laser!

Now that [Glowforge] has released a continuously-refocusing laser cutter implemented with stereoscopic cameras, it’s great to see the community following in their footsteps with a DIY endeavor. See the whole system in action after the break!

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Mass Effect Rubber Band Gun A Beauty To Be-holster

October 31, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 6 Comments

This Halloween, crafting most of your props and replicas wont be as easy as hitting “print.” This Mass Effect M-6 Carnifex Rubber Band Gun is the exception, though, and it’s all thanks to the detailed efforts of [eggfooyoung]. Like many others in childhood, [eggfooyoung] dreamed of sporting his own rubber-band gun. Year’s later, he’s made that dream a reality, and one for many others as well.

Mechanically, rubber-band guns, especially semi-automatic ones, are a finely tuned escapade into complex levers and joints. [eggfooyoung] took it upon himself to learn from the best in the craft, in this case, YouTube user [RBGuns] who has posted designes for numerous rubber band weapons. Overall, the M-6 Carnifex is a triumph of shared knowledge, as it’s an iteration of [RBGun’s] M9 build. [eggfooyoung’s] documentation is also everything we’d love to see in a weekend project: design files [PDF], detailed pictures documenting the step-by-step gluing process, and resources to dig more deeply into building your own rubber band guns.

Light Speed: It’s Not Just A Good Idea

October 6, 2015 by Al Williams 31 Comments

[Kerry Wong] took apart a PM2L color analyzer (a piece of photography darkroom gear) and found a photomultiplier tube (PMT) inside. PMTs are excellent at detecting very small amounts of light, but they also have a very fast response time compared to other common detection methods. [Kerry] decided to use the tube to measure the speed of light.

There are several common methods to indirectly measure the speed of light by relating frequency to wavelength (for example, using microwave ovens and marshmallows). However, measuring it directly is difficult because of the scale involved. In only a microsecond, light travels almost 1000 feet (986 feet or 299.8 meters).

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Neato Botvac LiDAR Repair Includes Juicy Pics And A Tool Hack

September 28, 2015 by Brandon Dunson 4 Comments

It seems second nature to us and it’s one of the ways we hackers are different from the larger population… sometimes we absolutely insist on buying something that is already broken. Which is where we join [Anton] as he reverse engineers, debugs, and repairs a broken Neato Botvac’s LiDAR system all in the name of having clean floors at a fraction of the cost.

Now keep your head on a swivel ’cause along the way [Anton] has the all-too familiar point in his repair where he puts the original project on hold while he makes a specialized tool he needs to finish the job. It’s hard to tell which is more impressive: turning a laptop webcam into a camera capable of clearly viewing bond wires and (wait for it!) where they are attached on the Silicon, or that he (yeah, we were making a comparison…member?) went straight back to solving the original problem. [Anton] did split this project into two separate blog posts, the first one is linked above and it’s not until the second post that he fixes the original problem. Perhaps there was a bit of scope creep, which was the reason for the separate blog entries? At any rate, [Anton] does a great job documenting the process along with what he calls some ‘juicy pictures’ and you can see a few of them after the break.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Neato hack (there’s pun in there somewhere, commenters below us will surely wipe the floor with it). LiDar on the other hand has been covered more recently in a Police LiDAR Tear Down and another post relating more directly to [Anton’s] repair.

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Drawbacks Of Laser Cut Delrin–and How To Slip Around Them

September 22, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 34 Comments

Welcome back to part II in this ensemble of techniques with laser-cut Delrin. Thanks for many of the great insights along the way in the comments. In this guide, I’d like to go over some of the more immediate kinks that come to mind when getting started with this material.

Sourcing Delrin Sheets

When it comes to shopping, there are a variety of suppliers to choose from, but there are a few key words and thoughts to keep in mind.

Names

First, Delrin, is the “brand name” that refers to the Acetal homopolymer. Variants may also be labeled, acetal or acetal homopolymer. Delrin’s natural color is a soft white, but dyes can take it into a range of other colors. Black and white are, by far, the most common, though.

Tolerances

In the previous guide, all of the examples were cut from a small range of sheet thicknesses (0.0625[in], 0.09375[in], and .125[in]) sourced from OnlineMetals. As the thickness of the sheet increases, the tolerances on the thickness rating will also become more loose. You might buy a .125[in] plate and find it to be .124[in] in some places and .126[in] in others. If you purchase a .250[in] sheet, however, you’ll find that it may vary as much as .126[in] oversize though!

Buy it Flat

Despite McMaster-Carr being my go-to solution for one-off prototypes where rapid build iterations trump BOM cost, I don’t recommend purchasing Delrin from them as their sheets don’t have a flatness rating and often gets shipped bent in (oddly sized) boxes. (Seriously, has anyone else gotten a few oddly-sized parts in a gigantic McMaster-box before?)

Internal Stresses

Extruded Delrin has internal stresses built up inside of the sheet. There are a variety of reasons why this could be the case, but my biggest hunch is that the extrusion process at the factory results in different parts of the sheets solidifying at different times as the sheet cools, possibly causing some parts of the sheet to tighten from the cooling before other gooier sections have yet to finish cooling. What this means for you is that as your part gets lased out of the sheet, you’re, in a sense, relieving that stress. As a result, the part that you cut–especially for thin sheets–may come out of the laser cutter slightly warped.

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Building A 3D Printed Laser Tube

September 13, 2015 by James Hobson 42 Comments

A YouTuber by the name of [1kreature] is doing some excellent research into building his very own 3D printed laser tube.

It all started after he managed to find an extremely high voltage pulse driver. In his video he assures us we should never buy one. He then designed some 3D printed fittings for a clear acrylic tube that allow for pneumatic and electrical connections. Using a hand pump to create the vacuum inside was the most difficult, so he quickly upgraded to a proper industrial vacuum pump.

Apply the vacuum, turn on the pulse driver… and well… see for yourself!

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3D Objects From A Laser Cutter

September 2, 2015 by Al Williams 8 Comments

Actors want to be singers and singers want to be actors. The hacker equivalent to this might be that 3D printers want to be laser cutters or CNC machines and laser cutters want to be 3D printers. When [Kurt] and [Lawrence] discovered their tech shop acquired a 120 Watt Epilog Fusion laser cutter, they started thinking if they could coax it into cutting out 3D shapes. That question led them to several experiments that were ultimately successful.

The idea was to cut away material, rotate the work piece, and cut some more in a similar way to how some laser cutters handle engraving cylindrical objects. Unlike 3D printing which is additive, this process is subtractive like a traditional machining process. The developers used wood as the base material. They wanted to use acrylic, but found that the cut away pieces tended to stick, so they continued using wood. However, the wood tends to char as it is cut.

In the end, they not only had to build special jigs and electronics, they also had to port some third party control software to solve some issues with the Epilog Fusion cutter’s built in software. The final refinement was to use the laser’s raster mode to draw surface detail on the part.

The results were better than you’d expect, and fairly distinctive looking. We’ve covered a similar process that made small chess pieces out of acrylic using two passes. This seems like a natural extension of the same idea. Of course, there are very complicated industrial machines that laser cut in three dimensions (see the video below), but they are not in the same category as the typical desktop cutter.

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