These have been kicking around for a while now but a friend just discovered them so I made her one for her birthday. This one uses a variant of the the living hinge design I saw on the MAKE blog. It uses a standard size servo, I removed the controller board, patched directly in to the motor and modified the servo for continuous rotation. It is powered by 3x AA batteries so it should last a while, which is convenient because I got too excited and glued the box shut before I figured out how I was going to change them. If I make another I would use magnets to hold the lid firmly closed until the arm comes out. (svg here)
18th Dec 2011:
Now available for sale, a little bit smaller than this one but functionally and aesthetically the same.
This kit can be purchased through my shop here
A different take on the living hinge, one single continous line allows this to be bent in different ways to the other hinges I've made before.
You'll all be pleased to know that this is the last cut of the panel joinery article, it's been great for me to play catch up with. There will be one more post as a round up but I'm working on something clever for that so I hope you'll appreciate it.
271/283
This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible.
The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounting points inside the metal work.
There tends to be a lot of excess wiring on these machines, a 2m long wire will service 10 different models of laser so the long wires tend to get do…
The first step towards upgrading a leetro based machine is to acquire a replacement controller. I opted for the Ruida 6442G to make it the same as my other machine. I bought my controller through ali express from Cloudray, it's currently $266 USD for delivery to the UK it took 3 weeks to arrive and cost around £250 GBP once customs and duty had been paid on it. I would probably recommend buying it through cloudray ebay instead, it's £260 but it'll arrive within a few days. Cloudray is my current part supplier, they've been pretty good so far. A delay suited me nicely with the Christmas rush on fractal puzzles and other products.
The kit of parts as it arrived was very complete. The controller and the screen were protected with bubble wrap and anti-static bags. Other parts include two USB cables to go from the controller to the edge of the laser, one for USB sticks, one for the laptop connection. An Ethernet extension to go the the edge of the laser and all the screw t…
