MSRaynsford

I wanted a quick box for Vale this weekend so I knocked this up from 6mm poplar, the joints are all a little bit tight and I have a weird feeling my laser isn't cutting vertically again. I wanted the lid to be secure so I put two more hinge points onto the lid. I'll gloss over the inscriptions as its too complicated to explain :) ( svg here )

Dominic  has been a fan of these assembly brackets for some time now, he even went as far as making a set and posting them onto thingiverse . I had to glue some wood sheets at right angles to each other and these seemed to be the right thing for the job so I cut myself a set too and glued everything appropriately. Pretty useful but mine were only 6mm thick to tended to flick themselves flat until I got the second clamp into place.

The third and final project from this years maker faire was a webcam capture program that would easily digitise children's drawings and then send them down to the laser cutter for engraving. The webcam holder  with led lighting to illuminate the drawing. I used a c# wrapper for the open CV library to capture images from the webcam, a little bit of filtering to remove pixels that weren't black enough. The image was then converted to G Code, and transferred to a GRBL controller that was wired into the Greyfin laser cutter . The G Code simply drives the laser to the next black pixel and burns a single dot for each pixel, repeat for each black pixel in the image. The program ended up being a bit of a mess as it evolved throughout the course of the weekend. It's got some nice features though such as the ability to capture or load an image for engraving, automatic detection of GRBL devices on the serial ports and free text sending to control GRBL directly. I'v...

Over at Just Add Sharks we're building our own laser cutter and that means design revisions and multiple prototypes. I'm sure you all saw our previous version  built over the course of a weekend and intended to test several design choices, such as the gantry mounted tube and the grbl / visicut software combination. We threw together an acrylic box full of interesting curves and features but when I got it home it felt very impractical. The curve on the lid was pretty wonky and I felt we needed to go back to the drawing board to design something we could actually build in quantity. With two weeks to go till the maker faire and a broken laser  it was a pretty big task, but I'm very happy with this new revision. The first significant change was to rebuild the gantry, the previous build used a large box section but that was replaced with a single sheet, the rail gives it strength and the stepper and drive belt can be fixed to it with minimal change. The laser tube moun...

With most tournaments the last place person gets the wooden spoon prize, 'Insert Funny Name Here 3' is no exception so I duly engraved the inside of a spoon again. I was impressed by how well the laser coped with the curved surface. They posted some tournament pictures on their twitter

Last week I ran some more trophies up for a guild ball tournament. The ' Who Cares Who Wins ' podcast guys ran their 'Insert Funny Name Here 3' tournament and wanted trophies for all the various prize places. I squeezed them in shortly after I fixed my laser and have held them off until now partly because I forgot about them.

I had a few projects based around this sea bass test rig and the keen eyed amongst you may have noticed that this is actually sea bass 2. This time I needed some limit switches, this is to test the homing functions and software limits available in GRBL 0.9j. I set it up so that both switches are fixed on the framework (rather than x moving on the axis), this means I have to Home the Y axis before the X axis but it works pretty reliably.