Anyone else see this little gadget? Obviously, not a patch on the Glowforge but a lot of interesting opportunities working outside the box. I have an unboxed engraver though and glasses are a pain, engraving out in the open with the possibility of other people getting a flash reflected off a surface is a worry and the smoke… Yeh that’s not great. Still, interesting:
interesting. definitely has some potential for very small businesses, or customizing pre-made things / food.
they have a curious hack about getting around laser classes, it seems; on its own, it’ll only engrave with up to 500mW of power, while if you use it in conjunction with the their shield, it’ll pump it up to 800mw.
now if only i could be ludicrously dangerous and plug my 4W laser into that…
I’m curious, what does the extra 3.5W get you in terms of cutting / engraving power? i.e. what will a 4W do that a 0.5W won’t?
I have the 1W Mr Beam which ran on Kickstarter a long while back and I do wonder if it’s worth looking at upgrading it to a higher power and adding air assist and better air cooling for the laser (which I honestly don’t trust because it overheats and cuts out often).
I’m kind of with you on that - I’m always surprised by the price of low wattage laser cutters. I wouldn’t have bought the Mr Beam if I’d know how limited a 1W laser was going to be tbh.
well i can’t tell you what the difference in materials might be because i don’t know what a very low wattage laser can do. i feel like it might mean the difference between sticking to paper or cardboard and getting to do balsa or potentially mdf. i’d be surprised if it could handle ply, though.
the speed thing is the biggest obvious difference to me, though, simply because you could run it correspondingly faster while transferring the same energy as a lower wattage diode moving at the same speed.
on the other hand i bet people would give it a wider berth in re safety because “ooh laser cutter,” vs those tools that get high-powered laser pointers and do stupid things.
This definitely looks tempting but I’m skeptical on the release date of November this year. I like the idea though! It opens up ideas to a lot of applications.
it’s neat but I’m not going to drop $300 or more on it. I think the mobility and compact size is awesome but it’s not a need and probably won’t bring me much business.
EDIT: by the way this is already being discussed here: