Who is copying who here? They both do the exact same thing. Any input on this?
http://mr-beam.org/
Check it out!!!
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Exactly the same thing, is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. But, Its a neat little product. It was also discussed quite a bit here:
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There have been posts about this elsewhere on the forums. And I believe @dan even is a backer.
The most significant difference between that laser and the Glowforge is Mr Beam uses a 5 watt diode while the Glowforge uses a 40 watt CO2 tube. So I expect the Glowforge to be able to cut faster as well as thicker materials (though I here diodes are more efficient per watt than CO2 lasers are).
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Mr. Beam launched their first Kickstarter before Glowforge was announced. This is the second version and was part of their original plans. I got to meet the Mr. Beam founders when they came through my area and dropped off my perks.
Mr. Beam isn’t intending to be a competitor of Glowforge; they are almost completely open source and DIY. Intended to be a etching and engraving with light cutting using the 5 W diodes.
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“Efficiency” here could mean one of two things. Note that “5 watts” and “40 watts” here refer to optical output power.
Diodes are more efficient at turning wall power into optical power (“Wall plug efficiency”). A diode will turn more than half of the watts you put into it into optical power, so your 5 watt diode will consume about 8 watts. Your 40 watt Glowforge will consume about 400 watts! Fortunately, this is only while the laser is actually on; in practice, it turns on and off quite fast; it will use much less than a desktop PC left on for an hour or two.
The other thing it could mean is…
CO2 lasers are much more efficient at cutting most materials. 1.064 micron light is absorbed much better by organics (wood, leather, paper, cloth, basically anything except metal) than visible light and exhibits total internal reflection in acrylic and wood, so you get much better cutting performance per output watt. So a CO2 laser like your Glowforge putting out 5 watts would cut faster than a diode laser putting out 5 watts.
So it takes fewer watts from the wall, but requires more watts of light to do its job.
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