I’m not familiar with the CoHesion project. I might check it out, but at this point I’m satisfied with what I have. I took the K40, removed the control electronics, replaced it with a RAMPS 1.4 board with Marlin SW, did some substantial changes to the SW, added air nozzle to final lens, and added a Z table to the chassis. The laser tube cooling pump is on a temperature sensing switch so that, if my unconditioned loft falls below 37F I turn on the pump and an aquarium heater in the water reservoir (AKA 2Gal Bucket).
Taking designs to the laser, I mostly use an Inkscape Plugin from TurnkeyTyranny, again, heavily modified, so that I can do multiple parts with different exposure rates including images at 540DPI with grey scale sort of controlled by bit density. I also have a post processor for CamBam, but I don’t use that very much any more.
I looked at SheetCam’s Laser plugin but its raster support, it’s only reason for being, won’t work for me and generating G-Code with what I have is trivial.
He’s an old K40 guy from the Google Groups K40 hangout. Hardware & better software.
I went the laserweb route because I hooked up with the designer first - and I had a Grbl board. It’s up to version 4 and supports several different boards.
Yes, total machine. Inside any of these systems is a very large CO2 Laser tube (that you DON’T want to see, or, if you do, it’ll be the last thing you see), a very long path for the beam aligning mirrors (again, you don’t want to get in that path), and finally the final mirror/lens where the beam is focused downward onto the workpiece. Not something you really want in an open frame OR a setting in which the mirrors could potentially get dirty, like a plasma cutter to take a random example…
I see that now. I didn’t know anything about them. I wanted to be able to do sharp text on stainless like that. We used to get signs made by a metalphoto process. having a hard time finding people doing it these days
The links that @jamesdhatch provided indicate that there’s been quite a bit of progress since I cobbled mine together and, it appears, that it’s significantly easier to get a useful system with fairly low investment in both money and time.
The key points to resolve relates to what you want to cut/engrave. The K40 type is limited to 12x8 bed and really won’t cut through any wood thicker than 4-5mm. It will not cut metal, but can engrave anodized aluminum or, as I’ve shown, fuse a material to stainless steel with fairly good resolution. I do quite a bit of acrylic with it, but haven’t experimented with an upper bound on thickness. The focus angle of the beam does create beveled edges unless you’re exactly focused on the center of the material thickness.
I’ve even engraved rice crackers for personalized holiday treats!
Wifey makes some nice cookies I can engrave “one of these could be poison” to increase my chances of getting one.
If it was more toward my bread and butter I might consider it. I have other things I need to look after before that. I was hoping a for a quick solution to my tagging problem.
