laser cutter

213 Articles

Voting Is Open For The Buildlounge Laser Cutter Contest

January 3, 2012 by 22 Comments

A few months ago, Buildlounge and Full Spectrum Laser started a contest to win a 40 Watt laser cutter. The only requirement? Submit a project that uses light in some way. The deadline is now over and voting is open, right on the buildlounge.com page.

First place gets a 40 Watt laser cutter provided by Full Spectrum Laser. Second place is a neat green laser courtesy of Wicked Lasers, and Third place is an EL wire starter kit  from Adafruit.

There’s a lot of really awesome projects that were submitted for this contest. The laser terminal looks really cool, as does the friggin huge LED wall and choreographed light show. We would be remiss if we neglected to mention that there’s a home-made x-ray machine in the running, and of course there’s the mathematical precision of fellow Hack a Day-er [Jack]’s solar clock that isn’t a sundial.

The guys at Buildlounge got a lot of submissions for this project, so head on over and vote for your favorite. The winners will be announced next week, Friday, the 13th of January.

Hackaday Links: December 25, 2011

December 25, 2011 by 13 Comments

Ah, Christmas. That wonderful time of year when you can roll out of bed to the screams and wails of children, grab a hot cocoa, and spend several hours arguing with an 8-year-old about which LEGO set to build first. Simply magical. While you’re waiting for the Doctor Who Christmas special to come on, settle down with these wonderful Christmas-themed builds that came in over the last few weeks.

One step closer to Robot Santa

Here’s an interesting way to spice up your seasonal headwear. [Mark] took a Santa hat and added a string of multicolored LEDs to the brim. The lights were picked up at a drug store for a dollar. Control is through a simple push button connected to an ATtiny13. Press the button, the lights cycle in a different pattern. Very cool, so check out the video.

A holographic holiday tree

[Auger] posted this very cool light up Christmas tree decoration on Instructables. This tree is made up of three pieces of acrylic. Different designs were laser cut into each piece of plastic – candy canes for the ‘red’ piece, stars and tinsel for the ‘yellow’ piece, and the tree for the ‘green’ piece. LEDs of the respective colors are cemented to the bottom of each bit of plastic. It’s called light piping and is used everywhere. This is the first time we’ve seen three colors, though.

This is what nerds do, and it’s awesome

[Rickard Dahlstrand] was playing around with his phone trying to take deliberately fuzzy pictures of his tree. He noticed the dashes produced from the LED Christmas lights must be produced from PCM dimming. Going through the EXIF data in the picture, he found the exposure time was 1/17th of a second. 1/17 of a second = ~ 58 ms / 5 (cycles on the picture) = ~11 ms per cycle = ~100 Hz frequency on the PCM dimming. Of course this is just about 2 times the line frequency in [Rickard]’s native Sweden, so we’ll call this confirmed. There’s no blog post for this, but we’ve never seen a clearer example of applied geekery. Simply awesome.

Yeah, we measured [Rickard] on a nerd meter

In the spirit of giving, [Johannes] decided to tell the entire world exactly how nerdy he is. He built a ‘Nerd Alert’ meter out of an old 1950s Japanese multimeter. The old guts of the meter were chucked, and a simple amp made out of a transistor amplifies the current flowing through the user’s fingers. A neat scale ([Johannes] measures somewhere between Amiga Workbench and Space invaders) replaces the old, boring, number-based one. Again, no write-up, but here’s some awesome build pictures.

Finally a use for all those old radio tubes

[AUTUIN] took apart a vacuum tube with a blow torch and a diamond cutting wheel. Surprisingly, he was able to put it back together, but not before making a wonderful Christmas ornament. There are two copper wires inside the envelope that are the leads to a single orange-red LED. The whole thing is powered by a watch battery. We’ll be sure to reference [AUTUIN] next time we have to take apart a glass bulb, because he managed not to burn, cut or blind himself.

Six things in a links post? It’s a Christmas miracle!

[Darryl] sent in a nice tool to select and display all of the hacker/maker merit badges available from Adafruit. Oh, we’re still trying to figure out who to give 10 badges to. We’re giving away skull ‘n wrench badges to the top ten hacks ever featured here. Leave a note in the comments, or tell us who should win.

Holiday wishes

Now put the computer down and go spend some time with your families, or failing that, strangers. Of course there’s an all day Doctor Who marathon, and that thing isn’t going to watch itself…

Snap Together Boombox Great For Taking Your Music On The Go

December 23, 2011 by 14 Comments

fab-boombox

[Matt Keeter] wanted to take his music on the go, and wrote in to share a great looking boombox he built for under $100. His goal was to put something together that could be made in pretty much any hackerspace/fab lab, so his boombox was made using simple materials.

He first modeled the boombox using cardboard, later fabbing it from wood on a laser cutter. The design allows the stereo to be snapped together, though [Matt] says that some joints were glued as an extra precaution. Inside the boombox resides an custom PCB he built which incorporates an ATmega328, an MP3 decoder, and an SD card to store his music.

One feature we really like is the control scheme [Matt] built into the boombox. Each of the capacitive touch buttons are positioned on top of a copper pad, which are wired into the control board. He says that while good in theory, he had a difficult time getting the buttons to work properly, though they seem to do the job well enough.

If you’re looking for a portable music solution and have access to a laser cutter, be sure to check out [Matt’s] page for schematics and firmware.

Laser Cutting Technique Makes Plywood Bendable

December 7, 2011 by 42 Comments

Here’s a laser cutting technique that makes thin plywood bendable. By cutting away elongated diamond shapes from the material, a lattice of strips connected minimally by alternating tabs is left over. The wood is then bendable, and it must be somewhat durable since the idea came from a product that uses the technique as a hinged notebook enclosure.

We don’t have much interest in it as an often used pivot point as surely it must be a problem with long-term use. But we love the look of it as a rounded corner on an enclosure like the Arduino project box seen above. The side walls are one continuous piece, with identical top and bottom sections which receive the alignment tabs. The whole thing is held together with just four bolt/washer/nut combinations.

But if you don’t have access to a laser cutter, we guess you’ll have to stick to altering pre-made enclosures for now.

Black Friday Deals And Contest Giveaways

November 21, 2011 by 7 Comments

Winter is coming, and it’s a great time to start accumulating parts and tools to keep you occupied with projects during the dark and cold days ahead.

Black Friday

We got a tip from Pololu about their planned Black Friday deals, and thought we’d check with some of the other parts suppliers that cater to the hobby market too. Here’s what we found:

  • Adafruit Industries Black Friday – Get 10% off of your purchases made any time on Friday if you use the code ‘BLACK’ (12:00am-11:59pm — we’d guess this is Eastern Time) – UPDATE: Get 10% of Monday 11/28 with the code ‘CYBER’.
  • Pololu Black Friday – many items are available at a great discount plus extra savings using their Black Friday coupons. Sales run midnight on Thursday morning through 11:59pm on Monday night (Pacific Time, 11/24 through 11/28)
  • UPDATE: Sugru – we just got an email about a special offer for this moldable material. Now through December 19th you can get your fourth pack for free using the coupon code: YAYCHRISTMAS

We did hear back from SparkFun. They don’t have a Black Friday deal planned, but they are planning on Free Day 2012 happening some time early in the year! We’ll keep our eyes open for details, but if you hear about it before we do send us a tip.

Make also got back to us. No specific details about Black Friday, but we’re told they have some type of deals in the works.

Digikey and Mouser didn’t get back to us in time for this post.

Laser Cutter Giveaways

Do you want a laser cutter to call your own? Yeah, so do we. If you come up with a really cool project perhaps you can win one. It looks like there’s two contests a contest going on right now that is giving one away to the grand prize winner.

  • Build Lounge is giving away a 40W CO2 Deluxe Hobby Laser Cutter to the best project based on light (community votes).
  • Instructables – Oops…. we waited too long to post about this one as the contest closed on the 14th, sorry. But chances are good this will come around again. For now, you’ll have to be satisfied at viewing the entries that made the finals.

Laser Cut 3D Sculptures Remind Us Of An Old Playstation

October 24, 2011 by 21 Comments

[Paul] a.k.a. [VoidFraction] put up the source and documentation for his sculptures made with laser cut polygons.

For computing his triangles, [Paul] developed LcAgl, an algorithm that transforms a 3D model into the AutoCAD file needed to cut a whole bunch of triangles and connectors. This file was shot over to a laser cutter and after a confusing assembly, [Paul] can make just about any low polygon count model he wants.

For his sculptures, [Paul] uses Coroplast, a type of corrugated plastic commonly used in political campaign signs. Coroplast is lightweight and flexible, a bonus when [Paul] is fitting his triangles together. The connecting tabs are made from acrylic – a very rigid material, so the triangles are held tightly in place.

Since the models in most 3D games are just a bunch of polygons anyway, this technique reminds us of the first 3D console games. [Paul]’s rhino looks like it walked off the set of a low polygon game like Virtua Fighter or Jumping Flash!.

3D-printable Laser Cutter

September 20, 2011 by 21 Comments

[peter] send in a reprappable laser cutter that he’s been working on. Even though he’s still having some problems with the accuracy of the beam over the entire square meter bed, it’s still an amazing build.

The build started off with a bunch of t-slot aluminum extrusions. After taking delivery of an absurdly large package containing a CO2 laser tube, [peter] started working on attaching motors to the axes. The optics travel the solid rods on pillow block bearings driven by the age-old stepper motor & timing belt drive.

The 1-square-meter of cut area on this machine is enormous for a homebrew laser cutter. [peter] discovered that once the necessary components are in place, it’s really how much aluminum you’d like to buy that becomes the limiting factor for the cut area. [peter] put the files for the 3D-printed carriages, brackets and mounts up on Thingiverse in the hopes his design can be improved by others.