Adding a digital amperemeter to your lasercutter

DISCLAIMER: ONLY CONTINUE READING WHEN YOU KNOW YOUR WAY AROUND HIGH VOLTAGE!!! EVERYTHING YOU DO TO YOUR LASER IS AT YOUR OWN RISK! Lasercutters are great. Especially since they got relatively cheap (you can buy a “40W” K40 Laser on ebay for sub 400€). Since I am a newly certified laser safety officer in my hospital I felt I need such a machine. However I decided against a K40 and opted for a more powerful, more big “50W” 300x500mm Lasercutter (one of the “China blue” variety – but it is actually green). Long story short I am quite impressed, delivery of the ~100kg palette was really quick (as in faster than the safety-googles). The machine is still quite well tuned, the beam seems to be aligned quite well. All in all the machine is not the death-trap I thought I

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Magmount refurbishment

I do (of course) have an antenna on my car, which was to date mounted with a pretty rusty old magmount. I don’t know; our local marten didn’t like that at all, the RG-58 which was unprotected ~20cm was completely torn to peices. To cut it short; I didn’t document the process. I could only reuse the magnet from the original magmount, the connector was completely encased in PVC and thus irretrievable. So i turned a new connector holder out of delrin (POM) and milled the fitting for the connector with my CNC. After I de-rusted the magnet, drilled matching holes, applied a base coat and some layers of laquer I screwed on the holder with V4A INOX screws. Tada…. (click for larger..)  

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CNCc R2 and ‘the gimmik’

Since my translation plugin is broken; this post will be primarily english – as long there is no working version of the plugin. Some of you might remember my little Tweet on Nov. 16. about the PCB layout being ready for production. The pic isn’t actually the file I sent out for production; mainly because I found this bug… So *surprise* the finished PCBs arrived; all 10 (I acutally got 11) were $29.90 shipped (to germany – I think I love you, ITead…)… (click for bigger image) Beauty, aren’t they?! – so I got down into my lab and… Har! Beauty 🙂 So. What is this anyway? CNCc is a CNC peripheral controller using an Atmel AtMega644 clocked at 20MHz and connected to the PC via USB (FT232). Features: USB 2.0 to serial using FT232 3x 10A / 250V Relais

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New videos!

First of all, here the promised hot air video: Then, I made a video (little boring I admit it) about milling alu on my CNC. I made this video because the setup produced a very nice suface finish… Music by Markus Menz

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