MSRaynsford

I gave a little talk at Starbase Leicester last night about how modern manufacturing had reached the hobbyist market and that local hackspaces were now filled with CNC mills, laser cutters and 3D printers amongst other useful things. I tried to tie this all in to the cosplay that they were doing and I hope it filled them with ideas about what is actually possible with access to the right tools. I showed some of my laser cut pepakura but I also drew and laser cut a paper version of a companion cube. The plan was that people would help me assemble it and the space would get to keep it. In the best laid plans of these things that never really happened so I came home with a box full of paper parts. While watching some TV I thought I would assemble it. After a few hours of show and only having one corner made I realised that I just don't have time for this kind of thing anymore. If I'm invested in a project I will make the time but something disposable like this object would b

You can buy a 40W laser cutter for less than £1000 and I recently acquired one of these cheap machines. There are many internet horror stories about these things and even though this one was provided in a non functional state it's still easy to see why the horror stories exist. I've given it a quick look over and these are my first impressions. I'm just going to talk about the actual hardware because the reviews of Moshidraw say that it is unintuitive, poorly translated and largely unusable, I haven't even bothered to install it because I want this machine to have an open source controller anyway. The Good The Price, similar models are priced about £500 on ebay. The layout, it's a sturdy metal box all wired up nicely Complexity,  it's a very simple machine which should make it easy to spot any issues.   The Bad - minor niggles that you can live with but shouldn't have to Manual Power,  manual power gives you a lot of control but sof