Gorgeous NickelBot Serves Up Lasered Wooden Nickels

May 9, 2018 by Donald Papp 22 Comments

[bdring] just recently completed his absolutely fantastic NickelBot, which is a beautifully made unit that engraves small wooden discs with a laser like some kind of on demand vending machine, and it’s wonderful. NickelBot is small, but a lot is going on inside. For example, there’s a custom-designed combination engraving platform and hopper that takes care of loading a wooden nickel from a stack, holding it firm while it gets engraved by a laser, then ejects it out a slot once it’s done.

NickelBot is portable and can crank out an engraved nickel within a couple of minutes, nicely fulfilling its role of being able to dish out the small items on demand at events while looking great at the same time. NickelBot’s guts are built around a PSoC5 development board, and LaserGRBL is used on the software side to generate G-code for the engraving itself. Watch it work in the video embedded below.

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200W Laser Bazooka Is Just Silly

June 30, 2016 by Elliot Williams 79 Comments

We weren’t going to run this one, because, well, it’s just ridiculous. But enough of you have browbeat us by sending in tips to the tipline that we’re going to capitulate. We’re not going to name you all by name, because really, you should be ashamed of yourselves. But you know who you are!

[Styropyro] does a lot of crazy things on YouTube. We really liked his “stuff in a microwave oven” series. He’s also obsessed with lasers and popping black balloons. So he took the laser heads out of four DLP computer projectors (the ones with 24 of those 1.5W Nichia diodes) and combined them. Yup, 200W of ~~405~~ 445nm blue.

Then he just straps them together and passes them through a lens. It’s not a tight beam, but this thing is really bright. Even though the beam is very loosely focused, it burns stuff. That’s about all you can say. Lots of laser. Boy Howdy!

OK, there, we ran it. Don’t do this at home. It doesn’t require much finesse, and it’s going to get someone blind. Much better to expend your efforts on something more civilized like a projector. At least then you can play vector games on the wall. And stay off my lawn!!! (Kids these days…)

For those that do want to burn stuff, [Joshua Vasquez] published an article yesterday about building a safe laser cutter… much more worth your energy than anything billed as a laser bazooka.

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