A friend had a pet that passed away and they asked if I could make a tombstone similar to the one that I did for Juanita. I did, and the results are attached. At the same time, I wanted to tune the laser to see how detailed I could etch the aztec calendar into an aluminum card. The results of that are attached as well
One of the challenges with 3d printing, and machining in general is getting the models in. Previously I had purchased david laserscanner, but never quite got it set up completely. I needed a turntable so that I wasn’t moving the parts by hand. Recently I saw the fabscan project and thought I could adapt it to be used with David. I began the process by laser cutting the panels. You can see the start of the assembly below.
Today I got my raspberry pi in and set it up to control my reprap. I also lasercut a case for it. Right now I’m just using pronsole, but it works well.
I decided that the the electronics enclosure vs 3 for my quad was bit crude looking. It functionally worked, but needed to be more refined. I modeled a new one with channels for the electronics. Then I lasercut a cap so that I had visibility into the case. You can see the results below. This is much more stable and refined.
To try and get better photo etching results from the laser, I purchased the 1-touch laser software from ULSinc. The result below is my first attempt to engrave a photo of my children in granite.
Tonight I decided to try an etch an image in a anodized black aluminum card that I had laying around. The image did not come out as I would have liked. For some reason when the laser rasters on aluminum, it doesn’t turn off fast enough for the movement. This is something that I need to work on …
For Alex’s 3rd birthday, my wife came up with the idea of a Angry Birds themed party. To help support her, I created the birthday hats and lettering on my laser cutter. It worked much better than I had expected. The only strange part was that the font is actually called “Feast of Flesh”.
A week or two ago I ran across a deal on an air filter for my laser cutter. This one is made by the manufacturer for use in malls when you can’t exhaust externally. It is turned on and off via USB through the software, so it is very convenient. I tested it out and it works great!!!! I ran it cutting acrylic for about 2 minutes and there was absolutely no smell. See the pictures below.
This evening I designed a set of gears using a piece of software called gearotic motion to build a set of gears. I used my laser cutter to cut them out. One of them was smaller that a quarter. See the below pictures:
So last weekend when we were running the laser cutter at the hackerspace, we got double images on certain items with small details. We thought it was the something funny about the images we were sending to the laser. Tonight I was etching some aluminum business cards and noticed the doubling happening again. Frustrated, I turned to the advanced manual and went through the tuning steps. By optimizing the settings, I was able to make a dramatic difference. You can see the results below:
