Sunday, April 24, 2011

1 Watt laser preparations

How nice to have an quiet Sunday working on your hobby in the garage. I spent the day preparing the CNC for the new laser diode that is coming this week. I'm getting a 1 Watt 445nm laser diode! For this purpose I thought it time to close up the CNC so no light shoots around and gets me or any of the kids ;-) and yes I do have the proper goggles as well, OD7+ for this wavelength. Don't even think to run that diode at it's full power without that. Be smart.




I've engraved the enclosing with the laser itself. The header of the blog is actually a shot of the case. Not bad looking :) I created that G-Code with truetype-tracer. This delivers some smooth looking fonts and allows for 'filling' Note that the filling requires you to turn off block-delete in EMC otherwise it will not fill. I've wasted a good amount of time trying to figure that out.



I've been trying to get the laser to cut stencils in some overhead sheets that I bought, but so far I've not been happy with the results. The TQFP32 footprint is tiny and the plastic melts too much. I still have a lot of parameters to tweak so it's a work in progress.

I seem to have broken the home switch on the y-axis. I'll have to look at the printer carcasses I have sitting in the corner for any more switches.

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