Scanning some of the usual RSS feeds, I saw this link to an interesting little laser paper cutter project, driven by Arduinos and a couple of EasyDriver stepper motor boards, and uses parts salvaged from a DVD-R board:
Not as useful as full fledged laser cutter, but a neat project nonetheless.
Well, it’s not “fully fledged”, true, but it actually has all the same parts and uses all the same software someone would use on a 40W-60W CO2 laser , so it is a very useful project indeed. I’ve provided some CNC models for the project ( SVG and CNC files here – http://elabz.com/cnc-files/ ) and working on some more, and the challenge of fitting everything on a 1.5″ x 1.5″ piece of material is the large part of the fun!
It is also a very good educational project to do with kids because you get to open a DVD-RW drive which helps to demystify the current high tech and get to program an Arduino – probably the easiest MCU system to start with and do other exciting stuff.
I definitely recommend this project to anyone interested in CNC in general or laser cutting specifically and I’m hoping Groover (the author) will win the Epilog Challenge!