Jeff and I recently purchased a laser cutter. Jeff and Johannes spent a long time adjusting the mirrors and lenses in the cheaply constructed machine until the beam was finally behaving in the right way (whilst I was experiencing my new guitar :). We’ve experimented with cutting through a wide range of things. Thingiverse is a brilliant concept: being able to download and print an object is amazing!
Johannes and I played around with sintering sugar. After tuning the laser power and speed to get the sugar to melt together, we decided to try out a multi-layer object. This object is made of something like 6 or 7 layers sintered on top of each other:
We printed the object the other way up from how it’s shown above. The criss-crossed interconnection between the cylindrical walls was added in the last layer we sintered.
There’s more to come on the laser cutter front in the future… The software that the laser cutter comes with is a piece of Windows software called “NewlyDraw”. It’s got quite a limited and inextensible feature set. I’ve currently got this confined to a virtual machine, but intend on reverse engineering the PC-to-laser-cutter protocol so that I can replace it with something significantly more flexible and Linux related.
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