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I doubt I have the technical knowledge to do any tuning, but I've got some nice heatsinks on all the trouble components and plan to power up the laser slowly via PWM. I still need to pick up a cheap power supply off ebay that can do the ~30V but after that I should be okay.

Hi, I managed to pick up one of these units a while ago and have only just gotten around to getting it working. After doing a bit of research, I've found a few references to the laser I am dealing with: http://laserpointerforums.com/f43/starwarz-co2-power-47504-3.html#post656314...

You can check a calculator like the one here: CalcTool: Diffraction grating calculator The calculator only shows the angles for the first three lines, but the rest will vary by the same angle. Id guess you will want something around 100 lines/mm, but I don't know where you would get a grating...

Since the sheet is only 0.010" thick he should be able to focus the beam to a fine point so the beam diameter isn't as critical. I would consider it impossible to leave a cut only 0.002" wide though.

Having a table to retrofit changes your options in your favor. The biggest difference between a laser diode and a co2 laser is the wavelength. The coherent diode, will be outputting light very close to the visible range and that means that any white surface will reflect most of the laser. On...

Wider spacing between the lines of a diffraction grating will produce smaller angles between the diffracted beams.

As has been said, you are likely looking at a five figure investment. If you already have an xy table and just want to retrofit a laser you may be able to slowly cut black mylar with a laser diode (likely ~10 watts of fiber coupled IR), but for white mylar at high speeds you will need 40+ watts...

Does this unit need water cooling? How much is shipping to Canada? (Calgary, AB, T2T3M5 to be particular). Also, as long as shipping isn't ridiculous, I'll buy it.

Although I expect bluray to cut white paper better than IR I am hesitant to use an overdriven harvested diode for continous use. For example, I expect the PHR I am using to die in the near future just because it is spending several hours on at a time at many times its rated power. I'm pretty...

To be honest, an arduino is a really bad way of making a laser cutter. I just did it because I didn't want to fiddle around with CAD programs and buy specific CNC hardware (that stuff gets expensive). There is code online that takes vector images and chunks them into a series of steps (like...

Building a laser cutter is actually pretty simple. Because the laser doesn't apply any force to the machine you don't need to worry about rigidity. All you need is a pair of motors and some threaded rod. My machine looks sharp but I used an arduino instead of a real stepper motor controller...

Sorry, it is unlikely that any laser will work on an LCD screen. It doesn't matter how much power you use or how you focus the beam. This question is like "Why can't I see the laser beams dot when I point it at a mirror?" All of the light is being reflected. (That's why the dot is very strong...

The fiber coupled IR lasers seem like they would work well with my setup. What is the feasibility of getting someone to hook one up to a TTL driver like the flexmod ( http://hacylon.case.edu/ebay/laser_diode/FlexMod01.php ) and finish up the build with heatsinking etc? I've worked with laser...

EDIT, Nov/2010: This post has been receiving a modest amount of traffic from others looking to build laser cutters and unfortunately I think that it under-represents the difficulty of building a laser cutter. While the pictures can attest to the fact that I can indeed cut fairly precise shapes...

You seem to be under the illusion that the diode in question will cost a similar amount to a LOC diode. My guess is that the diode you linked would cost more than 500$ if you can even buy one.

You bring up a good point. There are a few differences between an LED and a pulsed laser diode. First, imagine if the pulses were applied at 1Hz. Although you would be able to see the individual flashes, the LED would look much brighter while it is on, and that would reflect itself in your...

I was 691175002 until I forgot my password. The password recovery isn't sending me any emails so it was easiest to just create a new account. I have no idea what pappu is saying but its wrong. To begin with, a laser diode driver is specifically designed to never provide more current than it...

Alright let me explain this properly. Pulsing a bare laser diode will not make it brighter or more powerful. If you can run a laser diode at 100mA, you can pulse it at 200mA for 50% of the time (Actually, you probably can't). This trade off will not appear brighter nor dimmer to the eye, but...