HydraFabber Blog Post
Tim Boyd has been an active contributor in our designs Sprints. Tim is a laser expert and he has produced a design for our laser cutter:
(image of 10W Laser Cutter Concept Diagram)
This laser cutter as part of our HydraFabber - which is a foldable combination 3d printer CNC Circuit Mill and laser cutter
John Stager is currently at Factor e Farm on his Dedicated Project Visit - developing the CNC Circuit Mill portion of the device and he is also near completion.
Check out the conceptual diagram for the laser cutter and please pass this on to any of your laser expert friends. We are reviewing the current design and would like your feedback on 1 general design considerations 2 verification of our calculations on laser cutting capacity and 3 any comments on the feasibility of these, especially if you have experienced with lasers.
We are ready to source the parts for the laser. The total cost for the laser cutter portion or 10 watts is about $2000. Here is the bill of materials.
(BOM image from link in the Drawing of 10W Laser Cutter Calculations)
Please review these calculations: 10W Laser Cutter Calculations]]
After the calculations are reviewed and after we receive feedback, we will purchase the parts and build out the laser.
For the CNC circuit mill, we have built upon Ilan Moyer opensource spindle from the the Center for Bits and Atoms
John Stager is currently working on the control software for running the CMC circuit mill. We are building upon the Fab Modules (link) from MIT. Here are additional animations and pictures of the spindle .
(John's animation, BOM, spindle images from John Log)
Feedback is welcome we look forward to milling electronics for our projects. As well as any other experimental electronics and future devices the laser cut itself will be used to generate scale models and paper and cardboard for are mechanical and other machines.
Tim's Technical Content
See 10W Laser Cutter Calculations and blend this into blog post.