Cutting foam with a 45 watt laser to make a 3D costume

Here’s a cool video from “Punished Props” on YouTube showing part of the construction of a robot hand using foam. The video shows going from a sketch, to Inkscape, to laser-cutting the foam, to gluing one finger together. I think the video will be especially informative for those who haven’t had an opportunity to actually run a laser cutter yet.

Not shown is scanning the sketch and tracing it in Inkscape (I bet they didn’t show that because of time) but that’s OK though because theoretically the Glowforge software will do much of that part of the process.

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I’ve run into the punished props crew a few years in a row, really chill people. Their ebooks are amazing if you’re working with foam. They just put out a new foammaster 2 set recently. I recommend them to everyone who is beginning at costume building. A lot of awesome stuff.

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Very cool.

This makes me wonder if the glowforge will show me where the cut currently is and show how much time is left.

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I can’t wait to see how glowforge will make projects like that so much easier. Amazing!

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The latest UI we have seen, and really every version so far, does show an estimated time remaining.

Unlike most laser software which calculates cut time from path lengths (and normally ignores travel time between cuts), since the GlowForge works out the waveforms in advance from the cloud, the time estimate should be spot on.

For current cutting position… There is a giant window. So it ought to be rather obvious what is being cut now, and what was already cut.

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And the camera too.

I could see how a dot on a line would be nice to have. In the “queue-up a job in a different location” scenario, it would be cool to be able to monitor the progress.

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It’s accurate to the second. For example, if you put the pattern on the right hand side of the screen, it will be a few seconds longer than the left, because the head has to move further to start. It’s neat.

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