Transcript:
Hi, everyone, guess what arrived in the mail this week. A 2.5 watt laser diode complete with heatsink cooling fan and just a single 12 volt connection. I’ve been able to slap some pretty amazing photos with this in action [Music]. The laser also came with a power adapter. This is a mains to 12 volt 2.5 an adapter. I won’t be using this. I’ll be powering a ladder directly off the Ram’s port on our 3d printers, of course, safety first. I also ordered some safety glasses to block the wavelength of this laser, which is 445 nanometers. That’s in the blue violet. Region of the visible spectrum. I purchased this model from Banggood. However, there are so many to choose from when selecting a laser diode. There’s some features worth mentioning power. You can buy these in power ranges from low milliwatts right up to 15 watts, focus! The laser power is best used if you can focus the beam to a tiny dot. This allows variable. Heights for the laser to be located and ensures you’ll get maximum performance for the power output. Pwm or Ttl. All of these laser diodes are driven from 12-volt, DC. And some allow variable power output by sending a pulse width modulated signal, which typically allows to fifty five steps of power output. The mount is very basic 3 by 10 millimeter m3 screws to attach the mount to the rear of the laser and also for m3 hex nuts, which allow this amount to be attached to the X carriage on the hyper cube 3d printer to control this laser. I’m going to be plugging The 12 volt input into the d9 output of the Raf’s board d9 is used for our cooling fans so I can use the same output to turn on and off the laser in software, but also we can control the power output using the m106 S 0 to S 355 so 255 steps of power output on the laser. The actual DC. Connection here is a 5.5 millimeter barrel, so I’ve just wired up another 5.5 millimeter barrel connector to my ramp’s board on the hyper cube currently, so I can just plug that in like so and then turn on and off the laser. Using the m106 and m107 gqo commands, the laser is the first tool hit that requires connection into the Ram’s port of why this into the same cooling fan output as the III uses up here obviously to be able to detach the Eternity. How to enter and attach a laser. It also requires attachment of some screw terminals on the round’s board. That will get cumbersome, pretty quickly. One of the comments of the previous video had a great suggestion to use a universal connector somewhere about here to enable quick release of all the connections to the rounds board, So that means everything on the III on end would go through that same connector that would allow tool heads to quickly be able to be connected and reconnected without having to wire or anything directly into the Ram’s port before we turn on the laser. Make sure you’re wearing your safety glasses. I can’t emphasize that enough and also ensure that the build surface is non flammable here. I’m using aluminium, but if you have a specialized build service like this pregnancy plate, make sure you remove that burst first test the laser, I’ll send command and 1:06 to turn it on and m107 to turn it off before we start etching and cutting with this laser. We’re just going to make sure that the laser beam is focused to the smallest spot that we can using the focus ring on the bottom of the laser now to do that. We’ve got to come up with a height that we’re always going to use, so we can lower the bed to that exact height. Then we’re going to always be in focus so for me. I’m going to use 50 millimeters as the height that I’m going to focus the beam. And before I start using this laser. I’m just going to make sure that the laser is 50 millimeters above whatever surface that I’m going to edge, so I love the bed 250 millimeters, and I’m just going to turn on the laser now. I’m going to turn it on to quarter power and the G-code command for that is N 1 0 6 S 64 And you can see it’s on quite faint. Let me brief purpose this camera to get 1/3 of you of this dot, and I’ll put the glasses in front, so you can just see so you can see that that’s a small dot on the aluminium bed, But what if it was out of focus? Well, this is what happened, so I’m now turning the focus ring on the base of the laser and you can see the dot is no longer a dot. It’s kind of a line, and if I focus that again now it’s coming down into a small dot there, So that is now focused at 50 millimeters height from the Leila. All right, let’s see if we can cut some cardboard. Just going to pick scrap cardboard here. I’m just going to cut a square out of this just. A twenty millimeter square seems about right of printed heaps of 20 millimeter cubes. So why not start cutting 20 millimeter squares? I will just position the laser position 0 Put on my safety glasses and here friends, because I open the window. Alright, lets. See, yes, looks like it’s coming out straightaway. Check that out perfectly perfect, clean cuts that was three passes to cleanly cut through that could have done it in two passes, moving quite slowly, Ten millimeters a second or 600 millimeters per minute, and you can see right on the edges. There is some carbon residue left over from where it was basically burnt through next up a piece of 3 millimeter balsa wood. I’ll be printing The exact same g-code file, just the square and three passes at ten millimeters a second all home. The laser somewhere about there, So you man safety glasses and click print so much smoke. [APPLAUSE] three passes. Does it fall out. Yes, it does, that is pretty good cleanly. Cut three millimeter balsa stain. The aluminium again comes off easily. The next test will be three millimeter plywood. This one is going to be a bit more difficult other than cardboard and balsa, which is just basically paper mache. This is actually quite dense and takes up to 16 passes with this laser to cut through already done some some tests here to confirm that it does work and just, incidentally, if you try to print slower than say, 10 millimeters a second. I think these ones here were 5 millimeters a second. It just starts scorching the surface. So you’ve got to be careful not to not to cut too slowly, so I’ll try again. We’ll comb the laser somewhere about here. Position, Zero change. The g-code to the 16 passes squared. Open that up, glasses on and free. [APPLAUSE] Okay, let’s see the result. Is it falling out not straight away? So that’s the rear side you can see it’s come through. Should be able to push that out there. We go almost almost perfectly true. I unsurpassed. I’d say if I gave it, They kind of had it. Let’s say if I gave that an extra one or two passes, so 16 is quite a lot. I think that’s as far as I can go with. This 2.5 watt laser. If you’re looking at cutting plywood, you might want to go a bit higher like a 3.5 watt or even higher to cut plywood, but becoming cardboard paper, balsa wood, 2.5 watt, plenty enough to create our design to etch or cut will be using fusion 360 to begin or draw a box on the X&Y plane, clicking in the center and giving the box the dimensions of 200 millimeters by 200 millimeters, We’ll highlight this box, right, Click and select construction lines. This is the size of our build platform next. We want to draw something to actually etch here. I’ll be inserting some text right about here and the text will be check to see on. Youtube text is a little bit small. I’ll increase the height to 15 millimeters and make it bold. That’s pretty good click. OK, and stop sketch. The last thing we need to do is give this some height to do that will click the extrude button. Click anywhere on this text and give it a heart of say 1 millimeter. Now we’re ready to move across to Cam. We’ll begin with setup. The first thing we’ll do is select the starting point for our laser here. It’s chosen the center of this particular design. I’m going to select the bottom left as the starting point. So this is where the laser will be positioned before we hit print for the operation type. I’ll select cutting moving across to the stock tab change the stock offset mode to no additional stock and press. OK from the menu. We’ll choose cutting, we’ll start by creating a tool and we need to create our laser here. I’ll choose the create laser button under the type drop-down menu. Choose laser cutter and change the kerf width to 0.2 millimeters press. OK and, okay, the cutting mode there are three cutting modes vaporize sets the laser to maximum power. H will set the laser to half power, and any of these throughs will set the laser to three-quarter’s power here. I’ll select vaporize the cutting feed rate. This is how fast the laser is going to move on top of the surface here. I’ll change it to 1200 millimeters a minute that equates to 20 millimeters per second moving across to geometry. These are the faces that we want to etch with our laser, So I’ll just select every letter and number that we’ve created on here. Move across to the heights. Here we want to set the laser to be 50 millimeters on top of the surface to do that. The top height will change to 50 The retract height will change to 50 and a clearance height will set that to zero moving across the passes will change the sideways compensation to Center and Lastly, moving across the linking nothing in here to change press OK or re-orientate our view and we can see the tool paths are going to be 50 millimeters above where the part is going to be, we can simulate the tool path by pressing the simulate button and by clicking play, we can see how this is going to be etched with the laser moving across to the statistics we can see this will take 57 seconds to export our g-code. Click on the post process button. Select the Hypercube dot CPS file. The links will be in the description. The only thing we need to change in the properties of the Hypercube CPS is the start position Z by default. That’s 2 millimeters. Just delete that we don’t need to add an. Ez height here because we’re already setting it to go to 50 millimeters and click post. Give it a file name and save. I’ve loaded the g-code file into pronto face or you could copy it to the SD card and print directly just before I begin. I’m going to open a window because this creates quite a lot of smoke Whether you burn paper or any surface, really so now I can hit print, Probably too much power on the laser. You can see. It started to burn some of the surfaces rather than produce a nice, clean cut. Oh, yes, pretty good is almost fall out on their own. Just need a bit of a helping hand. I guess this would be a fast way to create stencils. I’m testing our itching on cardboard. If you set the speed fast enough and need power low enough, you can easily etch onto the cardboard without actually cutting through like I have. I guess this is the same playing. SVG file from the previous video hasn’t cut through perfectly sharp lines. You can scale this to whatever size you like. The other test I’ve been doing was with the Circuit Circuit Board. You’ve got to be careful with especially the paper. It likes to catch fire, so just be mindful not to leave the laser unattended. If you are vaporizing or etching, anything all in all, I’m really happy with the way this laser is performing on the Hypercube 3d printer. I’m especially happy that I’m able to cut three millimeter plywood. I’d say 2.5 watts is as low as you want to go. If you did want to cut plywood as this square took 16 passes to only just make it through if you were going to cut plywood, you’d want to up the power to maybe three and a half watts at the very least, but all you’re doing is etching and cutting softer materials like bowls, er, cardboard or paper? 2.5 Watts is more than enough than you’re ever going to need, and I guess the biggest finding from all this is TM out of smoke and fumes that are created while it’s cutting. Definitely have a window open at the very least, or if you can move the entire printer outside. Save yourself all the fumes inside your house. I’ll be testing other software and other materials with Glaser in future videos. So make sure you subscribe, And if you like this video hit that thumbs up button. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time.