CoolBot keeps your laser cutter from overheating

April 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Charles] wrote in to share the project he just built for the London Hackerspace. He calls it CoolBot, and as the name indicates it’s responsible for keeping the laser cutter from overheating.

At its heart the system is a water pump. It uses a plastic storage container as a reservoir, with an outfeed from the laser tube coming in the top of the lid. [Charles] mounted a temperature sensor using a 3D printed part to anchor it in the center of the return stream. An Arduino clone uses this sensor, as well as ambient room temperature and laser tube temperature sensors to decide when to switch on the cooling pump. As with any hackerspace add-on, this wouldn’t be complete without Internet connectivity so he included an Ethernet shield in the project box. Speaking of, that box uses panel-mount connectors to keep dust and water away from the electronics. But the lid of the controller box also includes a character LCD for quick reference.

Don’t miss [Charles’] explanation of the system in the video after the break.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Hackerspaces, laser hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Preparing sushi with the help of lasers

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

laser-cut-sushi-rolls

It’s not too often that we cover food here on Hackaday, but when we saw how a laser cutter was being used to help enhance the look of sushi, we decided to share. Even if you don’t enjoy sushi, it’s hard not to argue that it can often be more like edible art than simply food. The preparation that goes into well-made sushi is extensive, and this laser cut maki certainly takes things up a notch.

In the wake of the 2011 tsunami many businesses were suffering, including Umino Seaweed whose primary product is nori – the ubiquitous green seaweed wrapper found in/on many sushi rolls. They were looking for something to attract attention to the brand, while remaining respectful to the centuries-old tradition of making sushi.

They sent their request to ad agency I&SBBDO who came up with the fancy looking nori you see above. Each sheet of seaweed is laser cut with traditional Japanese imagery, from the Sakura (cherry blossom) to the Kumikikkou (tortoise shell). We’re not sure if these sheets of nori are actually for sale or have just been put together for solely advertising, either way we think this is a novel and frivolous, but awesome use for a laser cutter. Also, we’re pretty hungry now – anyone up for grabbing some sushi?

[via Make]

Filed Under: laser hacks, news Tagged With: , , ,

Hackaday Links: April 7, 2012

April 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Need some gears? Got a timing belt?

[filespace] sent in a neat build he stumbled upon: making gears with plywood and a timing belt. Just cut out a plywood disk and glue on a section of timing belt. There’s some math involved in getting all the teeth evenly placed around the perimeter, but nothing too bad. Also useful for wheels, we think.

We’re on a chess kick now.

Huge chess sets are cool, right up until you try to figure out where to store the pieces when they’re not being used. [Jayefuu] came up with a neat solution to this problem. His pieces are cut out of coroplast (that corrugated plastic stuff political campaign signs are made of), making it relatively inexpensive and just as fun as normal giant chess pieces on a tile floor.

<INSERT MARGINALLY RELEVANT PORTAL QUOTE HERE>

[Randy]’s son is in the cub scouts. Being the awesome father he is, [Randy] helped out with this year’s pinewood derby build. It’s a car shaped like a portal gun with the obligatory color-changing LED. The car won the ‘Can’t get more awesome’ award, but wheel misalignment kicked it out of the competition during qualifying rounds. Sad, that. Still awesome, though.

These people are giving you tools for free

Caltech professor [Yaser Abu-Mostafa] is teaching a Machine Learning class this semester. You can take this class as well, even if the second lecture started last Thursday.

Turning an Arduino into a speech synthesizer

[AlanFromJapan] sent in this product page for an Arduino-powered speech synthesizer. We’re probably looking at a relabeled ATmega328 with custom firmware here; to use it, you replace the micro in your Arduino Uno with this chip. The chip goes for about $10 USD here, so we’ll give it a week until someone has this proprietary firmware up on the Internet. There are English morphemes that aren’t in Japanese, so you can’t just ‘type in English’ and have it work. Here’s a video.

Six things in this links post. We’re feeling generous.

What would you build if you had a laser cutter? [Doug Miller] made a real, working fishing reel. No build log or files, but here’s a nice picture.

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Let there be light inside your Epilog laser cutter

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Bradley Gawthrop’s] biggest gripe about his laser cutter is the lack of Mac support. We don’t think we’d have any gripes if we owned one of these (yeah, that’s a lie…) but we can understand his second biggest issue which is the inability to see the work piece once it’s inside the machine. He figured out a very easy way to light the area as the cutter gets to work.

It occured to him that the optical head is always directly above the part of the work piece he was interested in seeing. He had been using a flashlight to shed some light, but what if he just added lighting to that head? The circuit is certainly nothing hard; some LEDs, resistors and a power source will do the trick. But routing the power is where things get more difficult. You need flexible wiring strung just right so as not to restrict motion on the X/Y axes. Most of his time was spent routing some 14 gauge stranded speaker wire for this task. He added his own 5V DC supply to power the adhesive LED strip which enjoys a resting place on the bottom rail of the head unit. Boom, problem solved.

Filed Under: laser hacks, tool hacks Tagged With: , ,