From my laser design engineering school classes, the trouble is the excitation bands dont line up. In vector mode, the contour of an object will be cut or engraved. Two of these sheets need to be bent to fit the bezel, I contacted a local company for this. I am looking for a power or intensity control but I'm not seeing anything along those lines. Hm, what was the phaser? We get premix for the Mitsubishi laser at work and the Bystronic we have mixes its own from three ultra high purity bottles. I am very admired for your interest, but the machine inside the CO2 laser is not only CO2, but also the parallelism requirement for the lens installation is very high, you have to calculate the length of the cavity and the curvature of the mirror, as well as the output. The charge from the CO2 is transferred helium, when this happens an photon is emitted and then then the helium looses it charge when it hits a wall. Getting useable energy out of it requires helium, CO2, nitrogen, the pump, and a decent length. And it's still very cheap for a lasercutter with such a large cutting area. The arduino is just connected to the steppermotor drivers and the driver of the CO2 laser. is pushing the bounds of what anyone would call reasonable That is why I built my own machine. I made a scheme of which parts can be cut out of every profile, i added it in this step. A nitrogen laser is very dangerous produces some bad ass UV as in skin cancer levels.
Anyway here the most amazing girl, who did build herself 2 lasers and lot more: http://www.diane-neisius.de/laser/index.html#muse. [ThunderSqueak] will need some sort of cooling for his laser, and for that hes constructed a watercooling jacket out of 2 PVC. This makes homing optional and not required before running a job. From 1930s vacuum-tube electron-beam technology to the sort of stuff thats cutting-edge in microchip production. Probably why its more expensive than CO2 lasers. I really hope you like my instructable and it will help some of you building your own machine! I have other pictures and information of it in action and pics of the tube while it is active that I still need to put up. Your eyes are not sensitive to long-wave IR like they are with a much shorter wavelength (i.e. Now that we have mounted the axis, stepper motors and other (3D printed) parts, it's time to mount the plates. Normal hobby lasercutters use a honeycomb table or something like that, but such a grid costs way too much for the dimensions of this lasercutter. If you don't own a 3D-printer and don't know anyone with a printer, you don't have to buy one yourself. Even if it did, youd just get a bit of arcing, voltage alone wont make water heat up one bit, thats all about the current and to make steam youd need a LOT of it, so much that youd be splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen first. Its used in certain types of lead-acid batteries, and needs to be re-filled. We have not tackled the Pi part yet, just the Arduino Uno running GRPL using LaserGRPL to run the table. I repair high powered (1KW 8KW) industrial lasers for a living. 4 months ago, Question My big yag (400w) is water cooled, it circulates deionized water around the two lamps and the rod.
For those who want to edit the code or want to keep developing the code to give it more functionallities, I've also uploaded the code itself. Answer Now that grbl can be compiled to the arduino, I will refer to the GRBL compiling page. That last one is for extra fastness of the frame. As I already said, the aim is to build a stand alone lasercutter, which means that the raspberry will read the codes from a USB drive and send them one by one to the arduino. We also need an 18 mm MDF sheet as the base for the working area. Just my honest opinion nothing more, opinions , interests,hobbies ,loves and obessions. Electrolytes, Theyre What Dehydrated Hackaday Writers Crave! The ratio varies depending on the size and design of the laser. In use, Nitrogen molecules are excited (typically thru an electrical discharge, but also RF excitation is common). About a year ago, I wanted to buy a CO2 lasercutter to make my workspace complete. June 7, 2012 at 4:55 pm Don't forget to hit save when closing wordpad. Because a 40 W CO2 laser will be used, the laser itself needs to be cooled. I have not hooked a bottle to my mass spec to look, I should someday. The first is, does anyone know a more exact amount of screws? Annode is always positive and cathode is negative. So, you excite another gas which gets excited at F and releases photons at G. Eventually, you get a F -> G -> X -> Y cascade setup. to bad you beat me to it. Reply
The build isnt complete yet, but having already built a few lasers, theres little doubt [ThunderSqueak] will be able to pull this one off as well. Even modern flash lamp yags are still this way. I don't really know how many of them I used but the quantity I mentioned will certainly do. [ThunderSqueak] is using a few brass barbed hose fittings, with washers stuck on one end. The seperate spaces will be seperated by 3 mm acrylic. The upper space is the space where the laser wil come. When the first mirror is calibrated, you can do exactly the same for the second mirror. // #define HOMING_CYCLE_1 (1Y_AXIS) ", Uncomment this line. If you are in a metric-friendly country, try a dedicated fastener store in your area and buy boxes of 100pcs. The only things not included in this price are shipping costs (a total of about 50) and the 3D printer filament. Try to have that spot in the center of the mirrors, adjust their location before aligning them. With cheap chinese 40w tubes being just over $100 it is pointless to build a flowing gas CO2 that will end up costing you way more. Something from the early days of the Buildlog laser cutter forums was that folks were cutting circular sections out of old hard drive platters and using these for mirrors in their cutters instead of the ZnSe mirrors one often uses. This machine uses a 40W laser! You can see the direction of the water flow on the pump. Your own link says Forget about lasing breath without helium. The greatest problem will be to get it hermitically sealed (you need a vacuum pump and a gauge), it will be easier if you keep the pump running and fill the gases constantly, then the problem of high voltage arcs (1mm/KV) and pre-ionization (10mm/KV). All you need to do is fill a tube with CO2, put some mirrors and lenses on each end, and run an electric current through the gas. Without them this instructables page would not be here. A 3D printer is a beautiful investment though. Praxair sells a variety of CO2 laser gas mixtures, and I suspect their competitors do as well. People have good success with epoxy for sealing, and a fridge compressor easily does 100 torr. Over on the Projects site, [ThunderSqueak] is pushing the bounds of what anyone would call reasonable and is building a CO2 laser from parts that can be found in any home improvement store. The biggest risk for CO2 is getting burned. The lower space is the space where the water tank and waterpump will be, these are necessary for the cooling of the laser. It's best to do this before mounting the plates because you have easy access to everything now. It is usually diluted with air. Change it to "// #define HOMING_INIT_LOCK". Actually, you can buy pure water in hardware stores. Normally it shouldn't give problems, but I would still recommend fireproof MDF (yes, it exists) for this use. I have some questions. lmfao i knew someone was going to make this comment. Pure water is actually an insulator. These changes tell GRBL that we don't use a Z-axis, this is necessary because when the lasercutter wants to return to its home position, it would home the Z axis first. In most of the pictures in this instructable, they're mounted on the back of the plate with a filter in front of them, so the fans are actually inside the ventillation room. Protecting The Hughes H4 Hercules With Beach Balls? Its just not economical to build one now. This strip prevents the fumes to escape the ventilation room between the profiles and the plates. The "" need to be replaced with those arrows, but I can't type them here because there is probably a bug or something here. The colour of the parts doesn't really matter, but I printed all of the inner parts in red (because we liked it) and the exterior parts in black (and some inner parts, just because I ran out of red filament ;)). One of the vibrational modes of the CO2 molecule is close to the excited N2 energy level and the Nitrogen gives up its energy to the CO2. Yikes O.o;; I didnt expect this to be put up here as I built it a while ago and just decided to put up the information on hackaday.io so others could take a look at it. Older high-power YAG systems (flash-lamp pumped) typically flow the cooling water directly over the flash lamp (or at least in contact with both ends of the tube, electrodes and all). You can get a copy off amazon, it was published in 83 so the electronics are a bit dated.
The HV doesnt come in contact with the water at all. To prevent a short, the cooling system uses a de-ionizing filter to make sure the water has as little conductivity as possible. This device reads the codes from your computer (or raspberry pi with touchscreen) and converts them into pulses for the steppermotor drivers and laser driver. HV source to spray electrons?
As for this step, I'll just explain how and why I got to this design. This needs to change because in the software we'll use (inkscape), the zero position is placed in the lower left corner. Also the helium that is found in department stores is supposedly anything but pure. I just spent a total of circa 350 on those plates. I don't know if you are familiar with laser cutters, but you have the tens of kV PSU and the burning laser itself (+ toxic fumes and in this case electricity + water).I don't care about the blog (and reading frequentation metrics can show you that), just be aware of the risks and hidden problems if you want to be a builder yourself. Im not sure what youd do for the half silvered mirror, though. Full water jacket and separate cooling system.
I uploaded a video of this lasercutter on youtube, you can find it here: In this step, I will talk about the design of this machine. Thats a brilliant thing to do with an old monitor. I mounted almost every plate, except for the back plate and the side plate on the side of the electronics. To design the objects that need to be cut, i use inkscape V0.91. I mounted the power supplies, arduino, stepper motor drivers, and relays on a plate, this makes it easy to work on it. It will be cheaper and easier to bend the plates. Some of the profiles need to be cut in a bevel of 22,5 to make the bezel in the front of the lasercutter, other profiles need to have a hole drilled or tapped thread in it. Only CO2 laser I ever got to play with was a 150W job. Lately my interest is on my other project, a base 3 (ternary) computer built from scratch. With the ease of building and potentially modifying this lasercutter in mind I decided to build the frame out of 3030 Aluminium T-slot profiles. To mount those parts, just look at the pictures how I did it, I think this is the easiest way to explain it. So you'll need to repeat this several times with a new piece of wood. I think. A common problem is the that CO2 degenerates into CO, and that messes up the ratio. The LASER ate itself. // #define HOMING_CYCLE_0 (1X_AXIS) ", Uncomment this line. Now, slide the Y-axis to the furthest point of the axis and push the testbutton again. The raspberry Pi also controls the relay module. You can see the values that need to be changed in the image I uploaded in this step. Generally, you attach the window using silicone or something similar (because you will need to remove it once it fogs from soaking up moisture). That way, our stepper motors will need to do 3200 steps per revolution with microsteps instead of 200. You just need to cut the profiles like I drew them for you in the attachment and everything will be all right. He focussed on the research about lasers and cutting with a laser, because it's amazing that you can cut objects just by using light. When the laser is calibrated correctly and everything is tested, the last plates can be mounted on the construction. It didnt use electric current per se but RF energy to excite that tube. Im skeptical about the lenses and one way mirrors?
9 days ago, Tip Unfortunately I don't have time at the moment to do that so for now I've just written a simple code. That would also produce NOx, which decompose in the laser into O2 and N2, A more reliable way is to stuff a pyrex tube with iron chips/shavings and pass the gas mix through while heating the tube to >400C, it will also take care of some of the moisture ;-).
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