New little toy

Well, It's not a CNC, but it's kind of fun. I've been wanting a way to make PCB's for some of my electronics projects. I discovered a method where if you have a laser etcher, you can paint over a copper PCB Board, and use the laser to burn off the paint, and then acid to remove the copper from those areas. Well step 1 is to get a laser. Found a small little one pretty cheap, delivered from china.

It came with no assembly instructions, but I managed to put it together pretty easily, and hey, the darn thing works. Still need to figure out the fine tuning, but I can see a lot of uses for it.

It can burn through paper and cardboard, maybe thin balsa wood. So far all I've done is just play around. But it is kind of fun.

Kewl!!!

Very kewl!!

what they said very cool.

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Neato! It is CNC though, isn't it?

You know, I reckon it is, even if it doesn't have a router attached.

Very slick!

cool indeed I remember back in the 70's we would do a tape up mask of the PCB traces by hand using a black tape on a clear substrate. Then using a photo resist on the copper and use a light table to expose the treated copper board. then we would acid was the copper to get rid of the excess. this would certainly be less tedious then making the mask by hand. It would also make changes to the design easier.

Nifty (just for a break from cool).

What's the specs on the laser as far as focal length and power?

Not sure about the focal length, but it is 'focusable' to several inches.

It's 500mw at 445 nanometers (violet).

It can't really cut much other than paper, maybe cardboard, but that's not why I got it.

Something went wacky on the board yesterday, I think a transistor blew, so Am researching options for a replacement board/transistor. Darren has been invaluable in helping to figure that out.

Basically, the laser stopped 'turning off'. Going to go out and do a little testing to figure out exactly whats wrong.

So it's out of commission for a little break, but when it worked, it worked great.

I kind of knew that I'd be facing some issues like this buying something from china.

Say hello to my new little toy! I knew I had heard that line before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVQ8byG2mY8

sorry to hear news Brent. Sure it can be fixed.

Ted very cool clip. Your memory is very good.



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I'm not. Still played with it a bit today trying to debug things. Ordered some transistors to try and repair it and learned a lot about uploading the grbl code to an arduino and figuring out the grbl settings.

Found a replacement driver board. So when that gets here, I'll be in business, and I'll have a backup controller with the one I fix.

Yeah, A little bummed it's not 100% right now, but It will be!

Oh sweet!

Neat.

Brent, will you be able to burn the person's name at the place in the dining room table with that machine?

A laser is something I have always thought I wanted but don't have the time to utilize it correctly at the moment. Consider me envious of all of you and glad to see success with them.

Bret,
what is the x and y travel on that thing ?

Back in business!

Jonathan Shively said:

Brent, will you be able to burn the person's name at the place in the dining room table with that machine?

Click to expand...

Why I oughta!!!!

Don Baer said:

Bret,
what is the x and y travel on that thing ?

Click to expand...

Lets call it about 7" square. So small.

But l like I said, I got it mainly to have something to learn about CNC and Gcode and to mainly make smallish circuit boards, and to see if I want to do some CNC milling type stuff in the future.

So here's my story and I'm sticking with it.

The first day I got it, I used it a bunch. And then the laser stopped turning off. It's actually kind of important that it can turn on and off, as otherwise, it just burns all the time.

I'm thinking i overheated the little surface mount Transistor that is used to turn the laser on/off. So I dig through my collection of stuff, and I find i've got some transistors around. And I've got a little SMD rework station. Basically a little super hot air gun that can melt solder. So I desolder the surface mount transistor, ans proceed to solder on another transistor, (not surface mount). Well, I probably got that wrong, and some how the arduino nano doesn't respond anymore when I plug it in via usb.

Darn dissapointing, So I connect the reset connector to ground, and can reupload grbl to the arduino nano. And i go through a bunch of stuff after that trying to figure out why the transistor isnt working. I manage to overheat the copper pad on one of the transistor connectors so that it came off the board. Fortunately, I found another location I could tie in, so i soldered in some jumper wires so I don't have to mess with the board and can experiment with transistors a little more.

So Then I take the nano off and dig through the grbl c code and find that there is a variable in the config.h that is now the default that thinks of course you should have a variable speed spindle. Well, My board does not support sending variable speed commands. With that variable enabled, the output pin for the spindle on my board is always at ~ 5 volts. I comment out that line, recompile, and upload, and now M3 will generate 5 volts on the pin, and m5 will drop it to 0. Bada bing, bada boom, I'm back in business.

So yeah, my transistor is sitting 4" off the board on jumpers, and its a bigger transistor then before, but it all works again!

TLDR:
Board overheats, laser wont shut off.
Replace Transistor, Arduino won't connect, Reload Grbl
Grbls Changed Defaults. Edit Config.h, connect new Transistor, All is good.

Honestly, one of the things I'm liking about it is the small size. Lets say I want to "sign" something I've made, I can easily come up with a way to put this on a cutting board, or a box, and use it to engrave a logo, date, signature/whatever on it.

I'm actually thinking about how i might be able to use it to do engraving on pens.

Oh, And putting it on a table to do some engraving would be a no brainer.