how to build a co2 laser from scratch

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how to build a co2 laser from scratch

2022.07.31
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how to build a co2 laser from scratch

And it's still very cheap for a lasercutter with such a large cutting area. It's best to do this before mounting the plates because you have easy access to everything now. Is it possible to etch images with this laser. Our first laser power supply from eBay was crap.

UPDATE: I have removed the raspberry pi and touchscreen from my lasercutter and just replaced it with four switches (for enabeling ventilation, cooling, lights and air assist). With two extensions for generating the G-codes. pinewood This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 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. I think it was something like a stun gun. 10 months ago, Hi iv not used screws iv used t nuts and bolts as well as L brackets if you would like a full list then email me designlab2020@outlook.com, Answer The thickness of the side panels actually doesn't matter. Answer The total costs for this awesome lasercutter are about 1900. I wonder how much power will get out, and also, how scalable is it. I really hope you like this project as much as I do! So I decided to use an MDF sheet instead. Cancelling the manned space program hasnt helped much either. The side panels of my machine are 12 mm. Fiber Laser Cutters, also known as YAG lasers do cut and etch metals very well because it has a extremely small focal diameter and its intensity is 100 percent higher. I plan on putting up the build log at http://hackaday.io/project/1043-Base-3Ternary-Computer-from-scratch, Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. So you'll need to repeat this several times with a new piece of wood. Now some values need to be changed. I suppose the ion-ray was just an ioniser? I would recommend you to use 6 or 4 mm acrylic for the cover because: 1. There are problems with spacial, temporal, and spectral stability and homogeneity of the beam, but its been a while since those classes, so I cant elaborate. Mutated Sea Bass in Wernstrom reverse scuba suits!

In the attachments of this step I included a guide that says which profiles that need to be mounted and where. I've already made tons of key rings, greyscale pictures, boxes, birthday cards and even a simple duck! Still, thatd provide the nitrogen, youd just need a way to suck the oxygen out. The one for the x-axis can be set on 1,8A.

You can see the direction of the water flow on the pump. If you do it wrong, you'll lose the little balls of the bearing and this would be very annoying. You have to change it frequently or run it through a deionizing filter to keep it neutral. That's not a problem! One problem was that lasercutters aren't cheap, especially not for hobbyists who want a large cutting area. Its used in certain types of lead-acid batteries, and needs to be re-filled. http://www.diane-neisius.de/laser/index_E.html.

It's written in C# with Visual Studio 2017. It will be cheaper and easier to bend the plates. I've chosen a laser head with movable lens, so you can adjust the Z-distance between the lens and the material you want to cut to set the focal point right. For comparison, HeNe lasers are less than 1% efficient, while CO2 lasers are typically 15~20% efficient. I will definitely continue working on this project to make it a stand alone device. Therefore I use a dark acrylic plate for the cover. It didnt use electric current per se but RF energy to excite that tube. All the electronics that are being used are mentioned in the B.O.M., except for two resistors (825 Ohm) and two capacitors (1000F). They're so thick because we didn't have smaller sheets at school and I liked the combiation of the dark plexi and the high pressure laminate. If you liked my instructable, please vote for me, I would really appreciate that. Once you have a machine like this, the sky is the limit! This makes homing optional and not required before running a job. The internet disagrees with you AVR has updated the project titled Rosie. Awesum!! CO2 doesnt excite in the F band. In raster mode, the object itself wil be engraved and not only the contour. i find this highly interesting. truthspew says: Despite being able to cut wood, paper, and a bunch of other everyday materials, a carbon dioxide laser is actually surprisingly simple. The remaining 500W is wasted heat, and many lasers use a water shroud integral to the tube, to dissipate the wasted heat. Also, between the profiles and every plate of the ventilation area, i glued an 'air strip' (I don't know how you call it in English, but we call it 'tochtstrip'), you can see it in the pictures. 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. The space right behind the working area is the ventilation room, all fumes will be sucked from the working area to this place and they will be exported outside by a ventilation hose. Basically the same thing, except you drill a small hole in the middle, and over that place (seal) a polished piece of rock salt window. It needed to be built from high quality materials so it wouldn't fall apart within two years. I dont remember any more, the only things that interested me in the time were the laser projects. Reply Cooling and recirculating the gas is hard, since the plumbing becomes monumentally more complex. Extract the .zip file, go to the folder 'grbl' and open the config file with wordpad. I could find out what it does in air but it would probably arc and melt the filament in seconds. [ThunderSqueak] is using a few brass barbed hose fittings, with washers stuck on one end. On my first try just today with a small CRT I didnt remove the implosion band before applying heat, so the tube cracked. Lately my interest is on my other project, a base 3 (ternary) computer built from scratch. 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 ;)). It really works quite well. This step doesn't include any files to download. No not superficial reading.

Please be careful.

You need to get a mix of CO2, nitrogen, and helium. I included the full wiring diagram for all the drivers and microcontrollers, the best way to wire them is to print the diagram and just mark which wires you already connected, so you'll know what you've already done. Plus, for this price, you get an awesome experience of building your own lasercutter and invaluable knowledge. For that we need a Gcode interpreter. Annode is always positive and cathode is negative. Now the exhaust pipe, the cooling fans for the electronics and the power plug can also be mounted on the backplate. Using exhaled breath you need helium. 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. Can you cut sheet metal (brass, aluminium, thin metal sheet) with this cutter? I just spent a total of circa 350 on those plates. Ha ha ha ha! When the laser is calibrated correctly and everything is tested, the last plates can be mounted on the construction. You won't need a computer then. You can get a copy off amazon, it was published in 83 so the electronics are a bit dated. Now the laser has marked the piece of wood with a dot. Wow! Probably why its more expensive than CO2 lasers. 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. This lasercutter uses a 40 W CO2 laser, has a large cutting area of 1000 by 600 mm and has a touchscreen to control it! My big yag (400w) is water cooled, it circulates deionized water around the two lamps and the rod. The names of the parts are written in Dutch, sorry for that, but normally this shouldn't be a problem. I wanted it to have a large cutting area of 600 by 1000 millimeters. For a 100W laser tube, you pump it with 600W of electrical energy, to get 100W of 10.6um photons. The arduino already has internal pull-up resistors, but they're too weak and won't work the way we want. 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. I mounted almost every plate, except for the back plate and the side plate on the side of the electronics. This is a full step by step instruction on how to build your own lasercutter! In the BOM, the individual plates aren't mentioned because you'll get more information about them in step 7. 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). Was about to say the same thing, her YT account is RetroGameGirl. I guess not many of you have a cnc miller at home. I did repair 1,5KW Co2 Lasers. I've uploaded all the files that need to be 3D-printed before you can start building your own machine. Deionized water: fresh steam distilled water typically has a conductivity around 2uS/cm, which is very low. The frame was assembled using 3D printed pieces. One for vector mode. First set the baud rate to 115200 and type '$$'. And those misleads are hidden for the purpose of Instructables contest winning.Problem is, the misleading parts are both really expensive errors and very dangerous ones ! However, youre pumping the gain medium with wavelength F from a xenon flash bulb source. careful when sliding the linear bearings on the rails for the first time. This machine uses a 40W laser! And they wonder why not as many kids go into science and engineering these days. Thanks for the plans/inspiration! lasing is one thing, efficient generation of usable output power is another.

Thats some legs. The ratio varies depending on the size and design of the laser. The water will be pumped from the tank to the laser, to copper pipes for cooling the water and then back into the tank. to bad you beat me to it. You just need to cut the profiles like I drew them for you in the attachment and everything will be all right. I used an arduino running on GRBL as gcode interpreter. If you know what youre doing its not that hard. In the pictures of this step, I added some drafts that show you the different views of the frame. 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 only thing you need to change is the limit switch of the X-axis. [9.6um is another common CO2 transition, and some lasers are designed for that wavelength instead.]. Most of the parts are ordered on aliexpress, some of them on ebay and the rest you can find in your local DIY-company. I don't really know how many of them I used but the quantity I mentioned will certainly do. I'll soon release a full PDF with all the stuff (even the mistake and why they were made), with the parts and the DXF. We enclosed the frame with hardboard and Acrylic (using the cutter to handle the Acrylic). They will mess you up before you know what hit you. I dont say its impossible, but you should get higher standards. Use crtl-F to find 'homing' and search until you find "#define HOMING_INIT_LOCK". I had to replace the lasing tube because the guy working in our graphic shop forgot to turn on the cooling unit before he fired up the laser. Four other things that need to be changed are: " #define HOMING_CYCLE_0 (1Z_AXIS) ", Comment this line. I was hoping to make a device that could both cut and etch. A lasercutter works with Gcodes. Before making a draft of what the machine should look like, I made a list of things that needed to be kept in mind when designing it. 2 years ago, 2 years ago Because a 40 W CO2 laser will be used, the laser itself needs to be cooled. If you know what you are doing it is actually quite easy to get a co2 laser this long to lase. The total price of these parts is about 1800. The seperate spaces will be seperated by 3 mm acrylic. Length of the tube (and thus power) is limited by the power supply and by the coolingthis can be cheated by using multiple tubes at the expense of a more fiddly optics assembly ;-). Allways use safety goggles when testing the laser. I made this machine together with my friend Thibo as it was our integrated project for school (we are in our last year of industrial sciences). 4 months ago, Question In this instruction, there will only be talked about the lasercutter itself. Also the helium that is found in department stores is supposedly anything but pure. When the first mirror is calibrated, you can do exactly the same for the second mirror. The cover can be mounted when the rest is done. I used a bit less than two rolls PLA filament (40) for printing all the parts. The files with the dimensions of the bevel are also included in this step. lmfao i knew someone was going to make this comment. I mounted the power supplies, arduino, stepper motor drivers, and relays on a plate, this makes it easy to work on it. You also need to print the hinges and 'voet deksel' to assemble the cover. You can download the latest version of GRBL here. 9 days ago, Tip Itll turn into a Bell jar with integrated electron beam vapor deposition for making GaAs optics for my own CO2 laser. You can also import files like .svg, .dxf, .jpeg For sending the G-codes to the arduino, LaserGRBL is being used. Its a work in progress, we'll tackle the safety systems and the Pi next. To mount those parts, just look at the pictures how I did it, I think this is the easiest way to explain it. Its just not economical to build one now. Quickly push the testbutton on the laser driver. I was inspired by the hobby series lasercutter from Full Spectrum Laser for the exterior design of the lasercutter.

This was because there wasn't enough space behind the fans and the filter, that also resisted too much. I'd love to compare the prestations of this lasercutter to a professional one. Just added a few samples of stuff made to date. Would it be possible to burn some pure charcoal (ie not bbq stuff) in this gas, to leave just He, N, and CO2? High Voltage plus water normally equals steam or worse..the writeup didnt say. My project is located here: http://hackaday.io/project/934-Laser-Additive-Manufacturing. I have not hooked a bottle to my mass spec to look, I should someday. This was a really fun project, I worked day and night on designing, building, programming and testing of this lasercutter and I truly loved every second of it! People have good success with epoxy for sealing, and a fridge compressor easily does 100 torr. Getting useable energy out of it requires helium, CO2, nitrogen, the pump, and a decent length. Was this you? The water jacket sourrounds the inner tube where the high voltage and gas resides. With cheap chinese 40w tubes being just over $100 it is pointless to build a flowing gas CO2 that will end up costing you way more. As I already mentioned in the bill of materials, I ordered the aluminium profiles with a length of 1980 mm in Germany. This device reads the codes from your computer (or raspberry pi with touchscreen) and converts them into pulses for the steppermotor drivers and laser driver. Still, what an awesome-sounding book. The tools needed for this are actually just a metal saw. need to be kept inside the machine. Did you make this project? Those are all the files and programs you need for letting the lasercutter do its job. But were not talking about people who know all the tricks, are we? If anyone can help me with a list of those updated amounts I would appreciate it. It's cheaper if you need to buy them at full price. Two of these sheets need to be bent to fit the bezel, I contacted a local company for this. With the ease of building and potentially modifying this lasercutter in mind I decided to build the frame out of 3030 Aluminium T-slot profiles. Therefore the margins of all the seperate 'rooms' in the machine are picked a little bit spacious. From 1930s vacuum-tube electron-beam technology to the sort of stuff thats cutting-edge in microchip production. The research I read says its possible so if I can take the front panel off a big CRT and have it hold together when evacuating it again I can use the original electronics to create a beam. Pure water is actually an insulator. Also, pronoun above is wrong, should be she ^^;; The laser gas is composed of helium, co2, and nitrogen. To assemble the profile, just start by assembling the bottom profiles, then the vertical profiles, the upper ones and last of all the middle profiles. Same bloke, but a new laser, I think. Sea bass are strictly assigned to kicking a$s duties, while the sharks get the lasers. 3. Learn how your comment data is processed. Again, with this sheet, I used 8 mm acrylic because I could buy them for a very reasonable price. 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 ;-). Before we can compile GRBL, you need to edit some part of the code to make homing (returning to its home position) possible. In my school, we have a cnc miller, so the plates were cut by one of my teachers. Making machines like this has become a passion in the last years and I'd love to continue doing things like this in my life! We replaced it with a CloudRay unit from Amazon and the PWM works much better now (other supply seemed to run at too high a voltage for the 40w tube (28KV vs 22KV (startup, 10KV running). The Raspberry pi is just connected to some buttons. 4 years ago The electronics may look difficult on the pictures, but it's actually very simple. Actually, you can buy pure water in hardware stores. Praxair sells a variety of CO2 laser gas mixtures, and I suspect their competitors do as well. I had already made a machine like this, so I thought: "Why not do it again?". The HV doesnt come in contact with the water at all. // #define HOMING_CYCLE_1 (1Y_AXIS) ", Uncomment this line. This means that you don't need a computer to send files to your machine. We did cooling using a radiator instead of the copper tubes, and I used a blower from a kids bouncy house for the exhaust (really works well!). Your own link says Forget about lasing breath without helium. So we agree :) Perfect !Please share when you get into making this project, hoping you will take my "suggestions" into account :). Well, I got some high quality glass to sinter out of the attempt, I suppose. From my laser design engineering school classes, the trouble is the excitation bands dont line up. We also need an 18 mm MDF sheet as the base for the working area. This strip prevents the fumes to escape the ventilation room between the profiles and the plates.

First of all, you need to install the latest version of the arduino IDE on your computer if you don't have it already. As this lasercutter uses a 40 W CO2 laser, it is obvious that the laser beam and even reflections of it(!) Its $1/gallon. CO2 lasers are very efficient, but not *that* efficient. AVR has updated components for the project titled Rosie. Generally, you attach the window using silicone or something similar (because you will need to remove it once it fogs from soaking up moisture). If you want more information on what all those numbers are, check out this page. This makes it possible for your computer to recognise the arduino and compile GRBL to it. It was an RF excited laser. Behind the ventilation room, there are two spaces on top of each other. Don't forget to hit save when closing wordpad. This will be done by watercooling.

I made the water tank out of an old 90 mm PVC pipe (800 mm long). 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. The aim is that the two dots are perfectly on the same spot. That last one is for extra fastness of the frame. 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. Youre going to fire electrons as some gallium arsenide and let it deposit to make crystals? 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. Now the electronics and the software is done, we are almost ready to use the lasercutter. Important! AVR has updated components for the project titled Jenny-XJ9. I have some mutated sea bass which deserve a warm meal. For the side panels I used high pressure laminate, just because it looks good and is laser resistant. I also just mentioned 'nuts and bolts' in the BOM. Try to have that spot in the center of the mirrors, adjust their location before aligning them. maybe a use for that old MOT that has been cluttering up the shed? This was an amazing project done out of a garage with tools on hand, clean wiring and some great work on the control and saftey systems even copy and paste it takes along time to customize code for this. You'll see, this is very easy and only takes 15 minutes of your time. We have not tackled the Pi part yet, just the Arduino Uno running GRPL using LaserGRPL to run the table. Even modern flash lamp yags are still this way. How Does The James Webb Telescope Phone Home? I went to ask for the amounts that are in the photo in step 2 and it came out at $771. As I just mentioned, ten computer fans will be mounted in the back of the working area to extract the fumes. I suppose I was referring to modern YAG systems which are continuously pumped, though the crystal is usually not pure YAG anymore.. ;). If you are in a metric-friendly country, try a dedicated fastener store in your area and buy boxes of 100pcs. There are two power supplies, one 12 V for the fans, pump and motors and one 5 V supply that powers the microcontrollers. My project list has just been reorganized. This needs to change because in the software we'll use (inkscape), the zero position is placed in the lower left corner. They can only etch coated metals and bare metals (requires use of coating or spray). From: http://hackaday.com/2012/06/07/incredible-home-made-low-cost-co2-laser/. Just my honest opinion nothing more, opinions , interests,hobbies ,loves and obessions. A common problem is the that CO2 degenerates into CO, and that messes up the ratio. The only things not included in this price are shipping costs (a total of about 50) and the 3D printer filament. Hackaday Podcast 179: Danger Chess, Corona Motors, An Omni-Walker, And A Fast Talking Telescope, This Week In Security: Symbiote, Smart Locks, And CosmicStrand, Your Own Engineering Workstation, With Mame. Question To use this lasercutter, G-codes need to be generated and sent to the arduino. The biggest risk for CO2 is getting burned. Sorry its in German, but its so interesting and you could learn a lot from it. Slide the Y-axis to the nearest point of the first mirror (the one next to the laser itself). There still are some parts like the electronics, laser, water tank that have to be mounted there, so those rooms need to be left open. After several working houres of your lasercutter, you'll have to redo this step. 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. Protecting The Hughes H4 Hercules With Beach Balls?

Fill the tube with CO2 is kind of understating it. This is important and needs to be done correctly because as you know, the laser beam is guided to the right direction with the use of mirrors.

Learn more, building a CO2 laser from parts that can be found in any home improvement store, 2014 Imagine RIT: An Innovation And Creativity Festival In Rochester, NY, http://www.jarrodkinsey.org/co2laser/co2laser.html#gas, http://hackaday.com/2012/06/07/incredible-home-made-low-cost-co2-laser/, http://www.diane-neisius.de/laser/index.html#muse, http://www.diane-neisius.de/laser/index_E.html#muse, http://www.diane-neisius.de/laser/index_E.html, http://hackaday.io/project/934-Laser-Additive-Manufacturing, http://www.amazon.com/Build-Laser-Phaser-Working-Projects/dp/0830606041/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top, http://hackaday.io/project/1043-Base-3Ternary-Computer-from-scratch, Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot, Where Pollution Hits The Road: The Growing Environmental Hazard Of Rubber Tires, The Surprisingly Manual Process Of Building Automotive Wire Harnesses, Biomimetic Surfaces: Copying Nature To Deter Bacteria And Keep Ship Hulls Smooth. #define HOMING_CYCLE_1 ((1X_AXIS)|(1Y_AXIS)) ", Comment this line. " As usual, I've made a complete bill of materials with everything you need to build your own lasercutter. Im not sure what youd do for the half silvered mirror, though. Thank the creator that I live a mile and a half from airgas and airliquid. It will be free and just to help (on my blog -> https://blog.osmoz3d.fr/en/category/lasercutter/, I'll made a proper article with all the data when it's finished), Reply 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. There is an English version as well: 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. 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. The lower space is the space where the water tank and waterpump will be, these are necessary for the cooling of the laser.