CNC Laser cutter

Last week was a pretty busy at the workshop. Finally the CNC laser cutter is up and churning out awesome stuff. The most difficult part was aligning the laser, burned myself once or twice in the process. Step by step after facing many hurdles it was aligned and focused. It is such an awesome feeling when you see the part come out from a piece of acrylic. I’m using inverted ceramic tiles to prevent the laser burning a hole though the ground.

Tool-chain CNC Laser Cutter

I design parts in inkscape or qcad, or download from thingiverse or download an image, at the end I get a dxf file. For cam I use DXF2Gcode tool, to set the parameters, the laser on off is controlled by the Z-axis. finally I run the gcode to emc2 and its golden.

Here is the gallery:

Summary

The FSM is hanging on the rear-view mirror of my car. The power setting was too high and the feed was slow, the edges on the part are a bit swollen.

I really like the phone stand design, make optimum use of the material. The phone stand file was just a G code file, I used Gcode ripper to convert to dxf and use dxf2gcode with my settings. also I changed the tab widths as I was using 3mm material.

I design the spool holder in qcad using a box file from makercase.com as the base file.

The heart is for another project, I didn’t draw it, I downloaded a line image in jpeg, opened it in inkscape and used the trace bitmap function and converted the heart outline into an path, convert to dxf scaled it and lased it.

I have yet to set the tool chain for rastering cuts.

The laser power is set by 0 to 5V input in the laser power supply, I used the pwm output for spindle control and added a low pass filter to convert pwm to analog voltage.

Comments:

asniex - Nov 0, 2015

what is the power of the laser ? I am also in india. What is the total cost of the project. Please post pics of the CNC laser cutter.

Its a 40W CO2 laser. Its costs around 3L