Yes. yes I was. I mean, Yes I am! Because I’m not done yet.
Without further ado I will sho you the latest progress. I’ve invested in a laser head with mount. I seems like the easiest thing to get the air-assit nozzle, lens and mirror assembly in one sturdy piece.
Along with it i’ve bought mirrors and lens for the cutter. They are of course mounted inside the head.
With a bit of sawing (milling actually) I got the head to fit on the laser 2.x carriage. In the picture above the red dot is visible and the laser pointer is in the pack of the picture. This means that the optical path is complete. The picture was taken before the lens was installed so moving around with the head revealed that the mirror alignment was not perfect. but it’s a start and when I install the real laser tube I won’t be haveing 40W of laser energy around the living room.
Also you can see on the paper below the head that The movement is working. I can send drawings from inkscape through Visicut and to the LAOS control board.
Speaking of control board here’s a picture of my own take on the controller. Based directly on the LAOS controller I have just updated parts to SMD versions to save board space. This allows the controller to be made on a 10 by 10 cm board from seeed – making it cheaper to get 10 form china than one from Europe. Crazy.
In reality it’s a generic x-y-z controller with an mbed in the middle essentially making it possible to control 3d printers as well. It’s just a matter of firmware. and okay, some extra hardware I’ll admit.
The last thing I’ll show for now is one of the small brackets I’ve made for holding a piece of wood in the bottom of the ‘tech’ area of the cutter. This board will be used to mount power supplies and controllers.
I’m sorry for the poor quality. It was taken in a dark corner of the workspace!