Lasers

Aligning 40 Watt laser mirrors, without burning your eyeballs out…

May 5, 2011
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Since the laser cutter has a fixed tube, and “flying” mirrors – it’s critical to get the alignment right over the full range of gantry movement. It occurred to me that if I could actually *see* the path of the laser, it would make mirror alignment a whole lot easier. Video also features my $25 [...]

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Upgrading a Laser Cutter from China (Part Two)…

April 25, 2011
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More information on the (ongoing) saga of my recent purchase… Using a multimeter it was easy to work out the wires coming from each motor. They are bipolar and so two pairs of the four wires will register a resistance, these are the A and B coils. They require 24V and 0.5 Amps. They stay [...]

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Upgrading a Laser Cutter from China…

April 15, 2011
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I recently wrote about some of the problems I’d had with the Chinese Laser Cutter I bought over eBay. It became apparent that I was going to have to replace the X/Y controller board, as this was not functioning correctly. The Challenge – adding a new controller I just pulled my old CNC out of [...]

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Buying a Laser Cutter from China (Part Three)

April 13, 2011
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And things were going so well… When I first connected the software to the cutter I could get no response at all. I examined the supplied parallel cable and found that some of the pins had been pushed in. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with some needle-nose pliers. So I fixed the cable and plugged [...]

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Buying a Laser Cutter from China (Part Two)…

April 12, 2011

Yesterday I wrote about the Laser Cutter / Engraver I received (40W Craftworks CO2 Laser Engraver&Cutter by strong_signstech). In this post I’m going to hook up the laser and do some initial system tests. Having read the posts on Andy Slater’s blog it seemed a good idea to remove the lens and mirrors and give [...]

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Buying a Laser Cutter from China (Part One)…

April 11, 2011
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Since building the CNC router last year I’ve become increasingly interested in adding a laser cutting/engraving head. Scanning eBay I found lots of component parts, but I did not have the expertise to create a working system. In situations like this I’ve found the best thing to do is buy an inexpensive “complete” system and [...]

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How to get 100% on your Senior Project…

March 26, 2011
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Build yourself a laser harp. At least that’s what Connor Thomas did – he’s been working on it for some time and he just sent me an email to let me know that the results came in and he scored 100%. Nice one. Here he is next to the tri-fold display.

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Inexpensive XY laser display using speakers

March 20, 2011
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[This project was featured on instructables.] Building an XY laser display “scanner” using a couple of 80W speakers. I looked into doing something like this way back when I was developing the laser harp – but I came to the conclusion that it would not be accurate enough – turns out as I wrong. This [...]

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…getting one million views on YouTube

March 19, 2011
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Yay! After 3 years of ‘tubing I finally watched the view counter on my Youtube channel account click past 1,000,000 views. Here’s the 5 most popular videos by subject… 1. The Laser Harp – got the lion’s share at 389,367 views 2. How the TARDIS really works – 23,317 views 3. Building a robotic Dalek [...]

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Laser bounce mirrors on the cheap…

February 20, 2011

I was looking around for a way to quickly put together some adjustable bounce mirrors and came up with the following. I already had some 1″ square front surface mirrors, so I went out and bought some brass hinges and magnets from a local supermarket. Using pliers I pinched the hinges so that they no [...]

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