I ended up buying a chunk of laser-shielding acrylic from Jtech Photonics and built it into an enclosure...As a carpenter, I make a decent electronics guy I've got an exhaust fan in the back and a fan blowing cool air in over the stepper drivers of my RAMPS board. I just need to put some sealant around the lid and tack on the last piece of the frame for the acrylic and I think it'll be time toby RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group
Thanks o_lampe! I ordered up a sheet of laser shielding material from Jtech Photonics and I'm going to build that into the lid of my box....I'd been going back and forth about building an enclosure right away or trying to get things going and saving the enclosure for later, but in the name of safety and keeping everything contained/together I started my box yesterday. With a few 1x10 and some pby RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group
I'm probably posting too much here but this is such a great resource! I'm getting my setup going and right now I've got the gantry set up but I just have a 5mW red diode hooked up while I'm learning the finer points of G-CODE generation and making sure the mechanics are all happy. I will eventually build an enclosure around the cutter but for now I'm planning to leave it open and use glasses atby RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group
The Chinese cutter assembled pretty easily, I just need to tidy up a few things. I'm going to print some limit-switch mounts and add them, as it didn't come with any. This week is busy with work, interviews for better work and teaching an Arduino course at the library, but hoping that I can really dive into this on the weekend.by RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group
Hi There! I'm building my first laser cutter and the hardware is coming nicely...I've been looking around at various softwares to convert images/vector files to G-CODE and I wanted to see what other people are using. Inksape with the Jtech Photonics plugin seems to be pretty prevalent, but it's OS-X version is clunky (in that it really doesn't exist, it needs to run on X-ll). Is anybody awarby RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group
I tried building my own custom gantry but I had a few headaches with getting the thing to drive and ultimately it sat on the shelf for a few months, but then I learned about Banggood as a cheap source of hardware. I picked up an M140 diode from DTR's laser shop and bought a Banggood chassis/motor assembly without the laser. My plan is to ditch the Chinese electronics and use that chassis withby RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group
Thanks for the responses! I considered modifying my printer but I use it a lot and I don't want it to be out of commission while I'm learning the laser getup...plus, building this from scratch will be half the fun! I'm not going to have a Z axis, so I'm planning to build the gantry with a few different mounting options for the laser so I can change its location based on material height. Any recoby RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group
Hello, I'm planning to put together a laser cutter with an M140 laser on a homemade 200mm x 200mm gantry driven by RAMPS. I'm completely new to lasers; I've been 3D printing for a long time but always using pre-packaged printers as opposed to getting under the hood and setting up Marlin. My plan is to first build the gantry and just hook up a 5mW laser dot initially, to make sure that I've gotby RogerA - Laser Cutter Working Group