[Bradley Gawthrop’s] biggest gripe about his laser cutter is the lack of Mac support. We don’t think we’d have any gripes if we owned one of these (yeah, that’s a lie…) but we can understand his second biggest issue which is the inability to see the work piece once it’s inside the machine. He figured out a very easy way to light the area as the cutter gets to work.
It occured to him that the optical head is always directly above the part of the work piece he was interested in seeing. He had been using a flashlight to shed some light, but what if he just added lighting to that head? The circuit is certainly nothing hard; some LEDs, resistors and a power source will do the trick. But routing the power is where things get more difficult. You need flexible wiring strung just right so as not to restrict motion on the X/Y axes. Most of his time was spent routing some 14 gauge stranded speaker wire for this task. He added his own 5V DC supply to power the adhesive LED strip which enjoys a resting place on the bottom rail of the head unit. Boom, problem solved.
