DIY Fiber Laser Adds Metal Cutting To The Mix

January 13, 2023 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

Sadly, the usual CO₂-powered suspects in the DIY laser cutter market are woefully incapable of cutting metal. Sure, they’ll cut the heck out of plywood and acrylic, and most will do a decent job at engraving metal. But cutting through a sheet of steel or aluminum requires a step up to much more powerful fiber laser cutters. True, the costs of such machines can be daunting, but not daunting enough for [Travis Mitchell], who has undertaken a DIY fiber laser cutter build that really caught our eye.

Right off the bat, a couple of things are worth noting here. First — and this should be obvious from the fountains of white-hot sparks in the video below — laser cutters are dangerous, and you should really know what you’re doing before tackling such a build. Second, just because [Travis] was able to cut costs considerably compared to a commercial fiber laser cutter doesn’t mean this build was cheap in absolute terms — he reports dropping about $15,000 so far, with considerable ongoing costs to operate the thing.

That said, there doesn’t appear to be anything about this build that anyone with some experience building CNC machines wouldn’t be able to tackle. The CNC side of this is pretty straightforward, although we note that the gantry, servos, and controller seem especially robust.

The laser itself is an off-the-shelf machine, a Raycus RFL-C1000 fiber laser and head that packs a 1,000-Watt punch. There’s also the required cooling system for the laser, and of course there’s an exhaust system to get rid of the nasty fumes.

All that stuff requires a considerable investment, but we were surprised to learn how much the consumables cost. [Travis] opted for bottled gas for the cutter’s gas assist system — low-pressure oxygen for carbon steel and high-pressure nitrogen for everything else. Refills are really pricey, in part because of the purity required, but since the proper compressor for the job is out of the budget for now, the tanks will have to do. And really, the thing cuts like a dream. Check out the cutting speed and precision in the video below.

This is but the first in a series of videos that will detail the build, and if [Travis] thought this would whet our appetites for more, he was right. We really haven’t seen many DIY fiber laser builds, but we have seen a teardown of a 200-kW fiber laser that might tickle your fancy.

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Laser Engraving, Up Close

October 15, 2022 by Al Williams 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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Micromachining With A Laser

April 19, 2022 by Al Williams 3 Comments

[Breaking Taps] has a nice pulsed fiber laser and decided to try it to micromachine with silicon. You can see the results in the video below. Silicon absorbs the IR of the laser well, although the physical properties of silicon leave something to be desired. He also is still refining the process for steel, copper, and brass which might be a bit more practical.

The laser has very short duration pulses, but the pulses have a great deal of energy. This was experimental so some of the tests didn’t work very well, but some — like the gears — look great.

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Open Source Replacement For EzCAD

January 16, 2022 by Chris Lott 24 Comments

[Bryce] obtained a fiber laser engraver to use for rapid PCB prototyping last Fall. But he was soon frustrated by the limitations of the standard EzCAD software that typically comes with these and similar devices — it is proprietary, doesn’t have features aimed at PCB manufacturing, only runs on Windows, and is buggy. As one does, [Bryce] decided to ditch EzCAD and write his own tool, Balor, named after the King of the Fomorians.

The controller board in [Bryce]’s machine is a Beijing JCZ LMCV4-FIBER-M board, containing an Altera FPGA and a Cypress 8051 USB controller. So far, he hasn’t needed to dump or modify the FPGA or 8051 code. Instead, he sorted out the commands by just observing the USB operations as generated by a copy of EzCAD running know operations. A lot of these engraving systems use this control board, but [Bryce] want’s to collect data dumps from users with different boards in order to expand the library.

Balor is written in Python and provides a set of command line tools aimed at engineering applications of your engraver, although still supporting regular laser marking as well. You can download the program from the project’s GitLab repository. He’s running it on Linux, but it should work on Mac and Windows (let him know if you have any portability issues). Check out our write-up from last year about using these lasers to make PCBs. Are you using a laser engraver to make rapid prototype boards in your shop? Tell us about your setup in the comments.

Laser Doping His Way To Homemade Silicon Chips

December 28, 2021 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

It’s a pity that more electronics enthusiasts haven’t taken the hobby to its ultimate level: making your own semiconductors. There are plenty of good reasons for that: chief among them is the huge expense involved in obtaining the necessary equipment. But for the sufficiently clever, there are ways around that.

[Zachary Tong] is dipping his toes into the DIY semiconductor world, and further to the goal of keeping costs to a hobbyist scale, is experimenting with laser doping of silicon. Doping is the process of adding impurities to silicon wafers in a controlled manner to alter the electrical properties of the semiconductor. [Zach]’s doping method is a more localized version of the simple thermal diffusion method, which drives a dopant like phosphorus into silicon using high temperatures, but instead of using a tube furnace, he’s using a fiber laser.

The video below shows his two-step process, which first blasts the silicon oxide layer off the wafer before doping with the laser shining through a bath of phosphoric acid. The process is admittedly fussy, and the results were mixed at best. [Zach]’s testing seems to suggest that some doping occurred, and it even looks like he managed to make something reasonably diode-like using the method.

Although the jury is still out on [Zach]’s method, we thought the effort was the important bit here. Granted, not everyone has a fiber laser kicking around to replicate his results, but it’s always good to see progress in the DIY semiconductor field. Here’s hoping [Zach]’s work, along with the stuff that [Sam Zeloof] is doing, kicks off a spate of garage semiconductor fabs.

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Laser Blasts Out High-Quality PCBs

January 11, 2021 by Dan Maloney 53 Comments

With how cheap and how fast custom PCBs have gotten, it almost doesn’t make sense to roll your own anymore, especially when you factor in the messy etching steps and the less than stellar results. That’s not the only way to create a PCB, of course, and if you happen to have access to a 20-Watt fiber laser, you can get some fantastic homemade PCBs that are hard to tell from commercial boards.

Lucikly, [Saulius Lukse] of Kurokesu fame has just such a laser on hand, and with a well-tuned toolchain and a few compromises, he’s able to turn out 0.1-mm pitch PCBs in 30 minutes. The compromises include single-sided boards and no through-holes, but that should still allow for a lot of different useful designs. The process starts with Gerbers going through FlatCAM and then getting imported into EZCAD for the laser. There’s a fair bit of manual tweaking before the laser starts burning away the copper between the traces, which took about 20 passes for 0.035-mm foil on FR4. We have to admit that watching the cutting proceed in the video below is pretty cool.

Once the traces are cut, UV-curable solder resist is applied to the whole board. After curing, the board goes back to the laser for another pass to expose the pads. A final few passes with the laser turned up to 11 cuts the finished board free. We wonder why the laser isn’t used to drill holes; we understand that vias would be hard to connect to the other side, but it seems like through-hole components could be supported. Maybe that’s where [Saulius] is headed with this eventually, since there are traces that terminate in what appears to be via pads.

Whatever the goal, these boards are really slick. We usually see lasers used to remove resist prior to traditional etching, so this is a nice change.

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Fun With A 200-kW Fiber Laser

December 2, 2019 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

We’ve all heard the “Do not stare into laser with remaining eye” joke. It’s funny because it’s true, as pretty much any laser a hobbyist can easily come by can cause permanent damage to eyes unless the proper precautions are taken. But a fiber laser with 200kW peak power is in another hazard class entirely.

Granted, outsized power ratings like this are a bit misleading, based as they are on femtosecond-long pulses. And to be sure, the fiber laser that [Marco Reps] tears down in the video below was as harmless as a kitten when he got it, thanks to its output optics having been unceremoniously shorn from the amplifier by its former owner. Reattaching the output and splicing the fiber would be necessary to get the laser lasing again, but [Marco] had other priorities in mind. He wanted to understand the operation of a fiber laser, but the tangle of fibers on two separate levels inside the chassis was somewhat inscrutable. The coils of fiber wrapped around the aluminum drums inside the chassis turned out to be the amplifier; fed by a semiconductor seed laser, the light pulse travels through the ytterbium-doped fiber of the two-stage amplifier, which is the active gain medium where stimulated emission, and therefore amplification, occurs.

With a little reverse engineering and the help of an online manual, he was able to understand the laser’s operation. A laser company helped him splice the optics back together – seeing the splicing rig in action is worth the price of admission alone – and the unit seems to be in more or less working order at this point. Normally the most powerful laser we see around here are the CO₂ lasers in those cheap Chinese laser cutters, so we’re looking forward to learning more about fiber lasers.

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