Lasers Lasers Lasers!

As you can probably tell from this week’s title, this blog post will be about the laser cutters in the Fab Lab! The Fab Lab has 2 Laser cutters that allow you to print and design many different objects from many different materials. But before I get into what I made and what I did, let me preface by explaining what I learned before the actual printing.

Laser Engraver Lesson:
We began by learning how to convert an image into something that could be interpreted by the laser cutters. The lesson was focused on Inkscape. Inkscape was the software we used to design the image we wanted to engrave. Our TA recommended selecting an image that was a silhouette because lasers cannot tell the difference of various colors and it was easier to pull out a bitmap from a vector image from a silhouette.

We learned about the difference between rastering and vectors. Rastering is an image made from many blocks (ie. when you zoom up really, really close to an image and you see it is made from blocks of color). They are referred to as pixels. Vectors use math to draw lines, shapes, and curves. They help retain great picture quality through scalability.

For my laser image, I took a silhouette of a bamboo tree and traced the bitmap. Then I deleted the actual image and used the bitmap image for the correct cut. I added more quotes and changed the size of the image to fit a notebook.

I learned more about the different materials that could be used for lasers. One type of material is acrylics. Acrylics make for really great cuts. As you can see, on the left an example of vector cutting and on the right you can see an example of raster engraving. You use both techniques for one image. Vector cutting is good for cutting the outline. Rastering is good for the inside if you want to cut out

Other materials that also work great are leather, wood, and glass.

These laser printers can even anodize metal– most water bottles, metal ones, have a layer of anodized metal, which the laser cutter can raster through. The only material it cannot cut is PVC, because it would ruin the laser optics and kill us because of the material and fumes it would release. (Lovely).

Something I thought that was really interesting was how you could adjust the grey scale on the wood as well.

My Laser Project:

In this picture of above, you can see my bamboo silhouette beginning to be rastered out.

Here is how the final product looked like! Something I was really surprised about was how accurate the words actually printed. Compared to the digital embroidery, lines were really hard to print. For the laser cutters, lines and words were really easy to print out– I was left wondering what the laser printer had a hard time printing. When I asked Gwen, it seemed designs that were extremely intricate were hard to print out.

I had some extra time to do another project and I wanted to see the effects of laser printing on wood, so I vector cut this logo for MakerGirl! I, unfortunately, didn’t have time to raster this entire image. Another thing I learned is that cutting this image takes only 5 minutes for a 5×7 inch image. If I wanted to raster the insides of the image, it would take upwards of 30 minutes for a 5×7 image.

Takeaways:
Again, I’m incredibly excited about how to combine all these making techniques. As I am going about considering my semester project, I am trying to figure out how to combine arduinos with laser cutting and digital embroidery and 3D printing! I probably won’t be able to get everything, but I definitely want to make something that combines at least 2 of these 4 elements…

Semester Project: Thought Process
So far, Josh, Johnny, and I have thought about making a digital 3D printed bluetooth tuner for our ukeleles. All of us enjoy playing the Uke and we all have a mutual interest in music, so we started with this. We’re still working on fleshing out the final idea.

One thought on “Lasers Lasers Lasers!

  1. Fine lines were really hard to print in digital embroidery, as you had mentioned. But I am not surprised that they were easier to create with the lasers as they are much more agile than the sewing machines! One thing I really like about the FabLab is that we get to us a variety of tools, and I don’t just mean the different stations we go to each week. I mean that we also get to use the software associated with the hardware in truly understanding how to make something.

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