discovered my little laser will cut paper so now im lasing some decorative shapes and hopefully some text to add to what is surely the greatest gifts of 2020

for anyone curious about laser safety, im wearing a pair of (cheap) laser goggles and only look at the laser through a camera. as much as i want to watch the purple death ray i have never seen even the low power targetting mode with my naked eyes

@voxel Aaah this is so cool! I’m just getting into building things with parts cut with machinery like this. The wood parts are cut with a saw right? Is the laser it‘s own machine or can you do both with one?

@rostiger i cut the wood with a handsaw to fit it on the small cnc machine, everything else was cut by the machine. i drew the shapes for each piece in inkscape, saved to svg, then used jscut.org to generate gcode for the machine to follow. it was a couple hours of machine time, a good saw and steady hand could do this is a few minutes, but i have neither

@rostiger laser and router are both the same machine, i have to replace the tool.

@voxel That‘s pretty neat! How much width do you have to take into account for the cut?

@rostiger i used a ~3.2mm bit for these, if i had more time id have used something smaller and added more detail. jscut automatically accounted for the bit width for me, no brains required