high power laser pointers

Having seen a couple of laser engravers on Instructables as well as their intricate results I made the decision it might be worth building my very own machine to create some wooden signs and artwork. I additionally made the decision I needed so that it is simple to build but nonetheless relatively good at engraving images which others would have the ability to build too. Thus transpire was to really make it economical and straightforward enough that anybody with a few fundamental electronics understanding and materials could construct it with little difficulty. Initially I would use Arduino and just about all three dimensional printed parts, but after getting some printer issues I believed Legos will make things much easier and simpler to utilize, and it is switched out fairly well. It isn't industrial grade and contains some problems with its very own, but it is a terrific way to get began with using and building custom CNC tools, and does not require any understanding of Arduino or soldering.

 

So, what we should have this is a quite simple laser engraver and occasional energy cutter having a CNC frame built almost completely from Legos. It utilizes a rack and pinion gear system, with three dimensional printed gear rack bricks, and could be built almost entirely with pieces in the Lego Mindstorms NXT 1. and RCX sets, as well as the green laser pointer and circuit components. The NXT brick controls the actions, consider I've not had the ability to look for a complete means to fix using G code with NXT each movement should be designed by hand. (I intend on finding a strategy to this soon!)

 

So far as the laser goes, it's a 200mw 405nm crimson/Ultra violet laser diode which was apparently restored from the Blu Ray drive. The hyperlink towards the exact one on eBay is incorporated in the corresponding step, but when you need to extract your personal it could act as well   I can not ensure the same results though. It's effective enough to lose through paper and into wood, also it did manage to create a mark in metal covered in black marker.

 

Disclaimer: This can be a laser project, meaning it calls for a greater powered laserlight (200mw) using the possibility to considerably damage a persons eye. As anybody who's labored with lasers will explain, use extreme care when confronted with lasers above 5mw (laser pointers). ALWAYS Put on EYE PROTECTION Once The BEAM IS ON, as well as when off be careful   the reflection from the laser light can nonetheless be harmful. I'm not responsible should you burn an opening inside your corneas (that is a real possibility), set your home burning (not as likely), spill hot coffee in your lap, or other things that occurs while building this machine and otherwise.

 

Lasers really are a particularly effective manufacturing tool given that they don't put on out, can reduce most materials with great precision, and don't have to be changed as frequently as traditional machine tools. To put it simply, a laser burns into/cuts a piece part by delivering enough energy to warm up the part inside a short enough time period to lose it almost immediately. For that reasons of the Instructable, the laser is just effective enough to chop paper and burn an indication into wood.

 

Color also plays a part in laser cutting: a laser's effectiveness is dependent around the colour of the beam and also the work part. Lasers are adjusted to output a specific wavelength of sunshine which we see because the beam's color. Since lasers are simply focused light, a top of the same color because the beam will reflect the majority of the light in the laser, thus reducing the quantity of light and therefore energy the item soaks up. For instance, a 405 nm wavelength crimson beam (such as the one I made use of) may have trouble burning blue objects, as well as much more crimson ones. Whitened surfaces reflect every colour of light, so that they are not as easy to lose than other colors on the other hand, black surfaces absorb every colour of light and therefore are thus simpler to lose. Metals reflect most light too, which makes them hard to cut or burn with many colors of lasers, so industrial grade machines use infrared lasers whose light isn't reflected by metal.

 

For any low energy laser like that one, a black coating at first glance of the metal object allows the laser to lose the metal slightly. Trying to utilize a visible light laser pointer to chop metal could be harmful towards the laser itself because the light could be reflected directly into the diode, harmful or wrecking it. What's important is the fact that the top of object being engraved (henceforth referred to as "work part") may be the right color.