I've decided to finally finish a "salable" design for my laser cut paraglider. I'm working on the final cut files now and finishing up the little design details. Here's part of it... a pilot! This is version 3, Getting the balance correct through trial and error.
balance
I want them to have actual paragliding line and luckily I have a ton of that. Making line rigs and tying hundreds of knots should be fun!
I decided to do some walnut iPhone backs for friends after my successful etching of my own etimoe iPhone back from Monolith.
I ordered some .03" walnut veneer with sticky back from Inventables. I'm sure not the cheapest but they are fast and reliable quality wise so just for a couple of test sheets... they'll do.
After a few test cuts and engraving it's looking like it cuts nicely at Speed 90 Power 60 and engraves well at 1000 DPI at Speed 100 Power 30.
It looks nice with just some mineral oil/beeswax finish but I've also ordered some OSMO Polyx Hard Wax Oil, which is ridiculously expensive but I've been told is worth it by Monolith.
I'd love to hear if anyone has other sources for veneer with adhesive back!
The dimensions for all Apple mobile products are available on their developer page btw.
I won! I entered my bracelets in the Full Spectrum Laser monthly free laser tube contest for June and I won... so I get a free laser tube. You can see the entire entry with photos of my setup and notes on production on flickr or click any of the thumbs below. This is awesome, because my tube is losing power. I have to cut about 10-20% slower and at 10-20% higher power to get through 1/8" 3 ply than I did when the tube was fresh. Not so good since I'm in production for Craft Lake City which starts on August 9th. Yikes. I hope I get the tube soon but I'm scared to switch out a working one for an unknown. We'll see.
I've only got about 21 bracelets about a third of the way through production, and I hope to at least double that by the fair. I need more time in my life for this. Ugh. I have lots of earrings and jewelry stands to cut too. I also need to get a website and business cards done. Yay for crunch time.
My friend Hannah drew this a few days back and I asked if I could have a photo of it to play with on the laser. She sent the first image. I figured I could have some fun with depth on the engraving, so I brought it into Photoshop, and did some manipulating and painted in some grayscale corresponding to the depth of engraving I wanted. I then brought that jpg into RetinaEngrave and setup 5 passes in the 3D Engrave tab by changing the thresholds to match that of the gray of the layer I wanted, set a different power and speed for each frame, and printed away. It took about 40 minutes to do the 5 passes on the 3" x 4.14" piece... though I realized some ways to optimize this when I run it again. The thresholds in RetinaEngrave aren't very precise so it ended up having a lot of stray pixels on each frame, causing it to do tons of unnecessary passes. Next time I'll just do the separations in photoshop and do each frame in the Engrave tab. Mental note to also expand the borders of each of the layers a bit so that there is overlap because the two deeper layers left ridges as they didn't go to the edge by a pixel or so. Regardless, pretty happy with how it came out. It needs a bit of sanding cleanup as I didn't mask it so the high points got slightly charred, but I'm excited to do more of this stuff... lots of ideas.
Software Side Note
I love the manual entry controls for Relative Location and the ability to quickly design vectors in RetinaEngrave itself. This allowed me to quickly cut the border and then cut the frame with precision as I'd forgotten to add vectors for it in Photoshop. Once the laser is homed, as long as your piece isn't moved on the bed, you can do all kinds of relative work from the starting position. Very nice. Overall... the software is growing on me. It's leaps better than I was expecting for sure.
Based on a number of designs on Thingiverse (here's one, another, and another) using the flexible hinge cut, I decided to make some bracelets. It appears this hinging design was created by Snij Lab in the Netherlands. Pretty ingenious and I can't wait to try some other patterns when I get a second. So I opened up illustrator and went at it. The design is nice and modular and easy to scale. Using 1/8" MDF board I cut at Power 82 Speed 30 masked with blue painters tape and the first bracelet came out perfectly. I wet it lightly and clamped it with some binder clips overnight while it dried and it now stays in form pretty well. I need to get some thinner more stretchy shock cord so it will slide on easily. I'll experiment with finishes and other woods very soon. Also need to try out some angled patterns for the cuts.
Sweet! It works. I was curious if I could come up with a more interesting clasping mechanism... so I thought I'd try and use rastering to cut half way through the wood and make a locking join. I ran a bunch of tests on the edge of the wood to see what powers would cut half way through. I settled on Power 80 Speed 20 with two passes in Raster mode. I rastered one side, then cut it, then flipped it over and rastered the other side using the sheet it was cut from as a jig which worked perfectly. I'll need to tune the tolerances as I had to do some exacto knife clean up, but it appears to work pretty well. The small pieces on the outside are too fragile as I'd expected, so I'll have to redesign it a bit. Not sure if this is viable for many uses but I'll play with it more on an actual bracelet and see.
I tried the masking film I ordered from SignWarehouse on the 1/4" Birch Plywood and it mostly doesn't work. It's not tacky enough and as it melts it peels back away from the cut so the board still gets charred. It works where it sticks it just doesn't stick around the entire edge. Bummer... that was a waste of cash. Will have to find something else. [UPDATE] After a quick search on SawMillCreek forums I realized ordering plastic film as a mask was one of the least brilliant purchases I've made in a while. Don't know why I didn't think about it... I saw someone else recommend it on Thingiverse and just blindly ordered. Turns out plastic melts! Shocker. I've tried masking with blue painters tape before and it worked great. So now I need to source some PAPER transfer tape... or just buy a bunch of 3" blue painters tape. Hmm.
Quickly, here's some results from 1/4" x 2 ft. x 4 ft. Birch Project Panel Plywood that I picked up at Home Depot. It's got Birch veneer with "whitewood" core, which you can see in the first photo. Second photo is of the cut and raster tests. After that I ran a quick 3D Raster Engrave test. For cutting with 1 pass, it looks like Power 50 Speed 14 or so works well. Rasters are also nice.
FSL's software is very good overall, but the newer 3D Raster Engrave function still feels like a bit of a hack. Instead of varying the laser power for each pixel, it has to do multiple passes at a single power. I'm not sure if other lasers have the aforementioned capability to engrave with one pass or if they all work this way. That said, it works pretty well.
You have to Print a grayscale image to RetinaEngrave, then click the 3D Raster tab or select if from the Tabs menu if it's not visible. Then you set the Raster Power and Speed settings and the number of "frames" you want (every frame is one pass of the raster engrave), then click "Auto Generate Frames." You can also create each frame manually if desired. After creating the frames you can go back in and edit their power, speed, and threshold individually. Creating frames basically slices the grayscale image and generates a Z-depth layer for each value of gray. The more frames you create, the greater your Z-depth resolution and the more passes the laser will take. So based on the original grayscale image, in final output to the cut material, a white pixel will get no engraving, a 50% gray pixel will get engraved to half of full depth, and a black pixel will get engraved at full depth. What that depth is depends on your power and speed settings, and how many frames/passes you do. Once you have the frames generated, each frame is a black and white representation of a Z-depth layer. So with every pass, black pixels will fire the laser and will get cut another layer deeper, white will not. Hope that makes sense. It's much clearer when looking at the software.
The first try was the large box in the upper left of the "TEST" Image above. It was 2.5" and was set at 500x500dpi with 10 passes. After the second pass I got impatient and realized I could test an image a quarter that size at half the resolution, and that I needed more power. Rastering takes forever! At that size and resolution, it's doing 1250 passes on the Y axis per layer/frame. So I went back to photoshop and quartered the size, reimported and upped the power to 40 per layer and the resolution to 250x250dpi. I kept it at 10 frames. That resulted in what you see below. Not bad, and I can imagine more frames would come out even nicer. I didn't record the time it took but it wasn't fast to say the least.
Pretty cool feature and I have some interesting ideas of what to do with it when time allows. It's going to take some experimentation.
Last post I mentioned I cut some ABS sheeting for a friend's project. As Angie Brennan pointed out to me on Saw Mill Creek's forums, this probably isn't the most healthy idea in the world. According to the ATX Hacker Space website, which has a very nice chart of what you should and shouldn't cut on their laser, the ABS "Emits cyanide gas and tends to melt." While I disagree that it doesn't cut well, at least in thin sheet form, it's probably best to heed the warning about cyanide gas. My laser is well ventilated and the negative pressure setup should send all bad stuff outside... I have no way of measuring or knowing so I'll be limiting this stuff in a big way. After a long search on Google my conclusion is this:
Pretty much everything you can cut with a laser will emit something that is NOT good for you to breath. Paper, plastic, acrylic... all of it. So ventilate well, even after the cut so any leaching from hot plastic is minimized, wash your hands, and limit cutting plastics as much as you can.
This is probably a good place to link to the Make page about determining unknown plastics. Better to find out what you are cutting than to breath chlorine or cyanide eh?
I've probably put about an hour of laser time on my tube by now, Here's the first few things I've been cutting and some stuff I've learned.
I use Illustrator for a lot of the graphic design I do so naturally, I'm using it with the Full Spectrum Laser. Their print driver makes this VERY easy. Just hit print and off it goes to RetinaEngrave (which has to be open in the background and already connected to the laser). Here's a few things I've learned the hard way:
I'll update if I find anything else but overall I've been happy with Illustrator and RetinaEngrave. The scales translate and the cuts are true to size.
The test pattern that is included in the software is pretty handy, though I really wish I could specify the number of grid steps it does instead of the hard wired 7x10. It basically cuts a grid of squares starting at low power low speed in the upper left and ends with high power high speed in the bottom right as you see in the image to the right. This is great for working out the optimal speeds and powers for a given material. I'll probably end up making my own version of this since the software only allows you to change the upper and lower limits of the range for both speed and power but not the number of steps. I.E. you can tell it to test from 0-50% power and from 20-80% speed, but no matter what it will do 7 steps between those speed values and 10 between the power values. There is also a focus ramp test which I have yet to use but should soon.
After the first cuts on cardboard I grabbed some cheapo 1/4" 5-ply plywood from Home Depot I had laying around in the garage and had a go at it. It took at least 2 passes to cut through it and going really slow at full power. The charring around the cuts is really bad to the point of it being charcoal. I think this wood would etch really nice but for cutting, not so good.
So I ran to Home Depot and got a few sheets of 1/8 in. x 2 ft. x 4 ft. MDF Cut To Size Panel for about $4 each. I also got a panel of 1/4 in. x 2 ft. x 4 ft. Birch Project Panel Plywood (which I have yet to test). I cut the panels up into 4 20" x 12" pieces which left me with a couple 12" x 8" pieces per sheet. It cuts very nicely and I settled on a Speed setting of 30 and Power of 80 to get a nice cut. The char on the cut is nice but it does leave a pretty bad smoke stain on the top surface ... which is probably more glue gunk than smoke. I purchased some film (06.50 inch x 100 yds R-Tape Clear Choice AT-60) from SignWarehouse.com today to see if I cover the pieces with that before cutting will prevent the smoke char on the top surface. The smell is pretty strong and it sticks with the wood for days if not forever. It also rasters pretty well as you can see in the lower left of the image to below.
It's pretty impressive how detailed and thin you can make the cuts and the piece is still pretty solid. Those "drips" are insanely tiny.
So after that I decided to try a long Raster Then Vector style cut and I came across these Palago game tiles on Thingiverse which looked like a great test, not to mention the kind of game I love to play. I redid the file in Illustrator CS6 (which you can download here). I cut at Power 85 Speed 30 and rastered at Power 70 Speed 100. Sweet.
I've also cut sticky back ripstop nylon at Power 10 Speed 100 and it cut the nylon but didn't go all the way through the paper backing so it was perfect for peeling. No photo ATM. Next was skateboard grip tape... Jessup to be exact. I cut on the paper backing side and Power 60+ Speed 100 seemed to work well. I tried to cut from the front and just cut the front grip and not through the paper backing but no such luck. Regardless it comes out well and is easy to peel afterwards. Going to do some custom grip for my brother's skate shop FIDNA at some point soon. Results below:
Lastly, today I cut some 1/32" or .9mm thick ABS plastic sheeting. It's textured on one side and shiny on the other and cuts well at about Power 100 Speed 80-90 from either the textured or shiny side. Though it does warp if you do a lot of very close cuts quickly as you can see in the test grid. We cut out a matrix of squares to fit around RGB LED strip lights that my buddy is using to make a large timer for his DLG comps... more explanation and photos once it's done since that probably makes no sense to anyone.
The only real problems I've run into with RetinaEngrave have been with the software hanging on launch, and it's usually just because I've pressed a button before the software was fully loaded. I've now learned to wait until it's connected to the laser, and the spinning wheel at the bottom left of the window is spinning. If it's stopped and I press a jog button, the software tends to hang.
Another bug is that every once and a while a jog button will "stick" and the head will run to the end of the axis. I've had this happen numerous times where I'll click quickly on a jog button to move the head and the head will just keep going until I click the button again or until it hits a stop. Still haven't quite sorted that out yet.
I've also just today had an issue where cuts along the X axis weren't as deep as those along Y which I haven't sorted... but I think is due to the guide wheel tension. I have to do a cleaning and alignment soon and will check this issue out then.
And lastly, the 1/4" ID hose on the air assist pump blew off today mid cut and scared the shit out of me because I had no idea where the loud buzz was suddenly coming from. Which reminds me... I need to find a quieter air assist. The one from FSL is crazy loud and by far the loudest component of the system. I can't cut at night in the house with it or my 2 year old would not be happy.
She works beautifully! It took a buddy and I about 20 minutes to figure out the networking setup so I could use the ethernet port instead of USB, but it worked perfectly first shot after we got that sorted.
Want to run RetinaEngrave but don't have a PC? Want to run it in a virtual machine with an ethernet connection instead of a dodgy USB connection? Read on.
I bought a used iMac to run my 3D printer and Laser. It's the environment I'm used to and I'd rather have the option of both operating systems rather than just Windows. So I'm running Parallels 8 with Windows 7 on MacOS X 10.8.2 on a late 2009 iMac 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM. So far so good. Installing Windows was no problem. Getting it online was similarly no problem. The issue came when I plugged up the ethernet cable from the 5th Gen Hobby Laser to the iMac and tried to pull an IP address. The laser boots up and searches the network for a DHCP server to get an IP address. If it can't find one it defaults to 254.253.xx.xx or some such I can't remember off the top of my head. If I set up the networking in Parallels so it used the ethernet port on the iMac, I could connect to the laser, assign it IP addresses, and run the laser, but I couldn't connect to the internet to register the laser or browse, and if I set it to a shared connection, I could get to the internet but not the laser as the virtual machine was using the wifi connection and not touching the ethernet ... plus OS X had control of it. Sorta confusing and not sure I still have my head around it... but... THIS IS WHAT WORKS (if you are using a WiFi connection to your router):
First get the networking going in Windows in Parallels so you can get to the web with a browser. This is easy as it just works after install by default as long as the connection on the Mac side is fine. Plug up the ethernet cable from the laser to the Mac, making sure the laser is off. Go to the Parallels settings -> Hardware -> Network and make sure it looks like this. Your MAC address will be different obviously.
Now go to the Sharing Preference panel in OS X and turn on Internet Sharing. Share your connection from Wi-Fi to computers using Ethernet. This was the magic bullet we couldn't figure out for a while. This allows the mac to share the WiFi connection and the ethernet port with the virtual machine at the same time. If you are using ethernet on your Mac to connect to your router... god help you. Actually... kidding... that should be much easier, just plug the laser into the network via a switch and you should be good to go without this last step. This worked great for me, your mileage may vary.
Now when I start up the Laser it pulls 192.168.2.2 from the local network, and RetinaEngrave sees it quickly. It registered and all was well with the world. I will assign it an IP when I get over my fear of changing something that works unnecessarily.
I grabbed the handiest vector file I had laying around from a logo I designed for Squirrel Wingsuits, loaded it up in Illustrator, and clicked print. RetinaEngrave got it, I scaled it, turned the power down to 10% and hit print. The stroke was 1pt in Illustrator, which it turns out makes the laser do two passes on the line as that's relatively thick. Next try was at .5pt and it was much better. Then I adjusted the head focus... even better. Then scaled it up and went to 75% power and it made the beautiful cut you see to the left. Awesome. The precision is nuts. We then tried a raster image at 4% power and again, impressive precision with micro perforations on the cardboard surface. Then some text. Works beautifully. Beer to celebrate! Very very impressed with this thing. I can't wait to start some creative projects with it very soon.
Side note: I got a call back this morning from the message I left yesterday about the red diode being a line not a dot. So one day call back time. Again, not bad for a company that is shat on all over the forums for having horrible customer service. I was worried, but am now very stoked with my decision to go with FSL.
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