MIT Laser Addon

Looks like they’ve put this together out of a Universal Laser… making it a… more universal laser?

@shop , you should procure this add-on!

:thinking: I have a Universal in the shop, but no aptitude towards building electronics.

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Actually, at a point in time, the Glowforge plan was to have interchangeable heads. The possibilities…

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interesting. slim chance they’ll let me build this in our office, but maybe Damian in our main shop…

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I’m not a believer that that… contraption… has potential to reach the market in a way that solves anyone’s problems.

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If I could figure out the right setting to have my :glowforge: do my soldering, I might do more with electronics!

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Be a dreamer!

It’s tough to say what the value would be.

I don’t know a ton about current cutting edge manufacturing technologies. I surmise the current method of this revolves around assembly line procedures — conveyors running from specialized machine to specialized machine. Is it more valuable to have a multi process machine? Ultimately, you’re doing the same thing overall. You conserve floor space. Might be prone to lower error rates?

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I would like nothing more than for this to be a thing. The thing I most want to be able to do is press a button to make electronics prototypes. I spent a lot of time a couple of weeks ago trying to convince myself to buy a Voltera PCB printer but it’s just not a solved problem yet. These things almost work, but unfortunately the gap is still too big.

Similarly, I haven’t seen a single multi-function maker tool that comes close to working reliably, and I think there’s a reason for that. It’s hard enough to get one function dialed in. This thing is just a hacked-up prototype good enough for a press release. If you look at the video on their site, it’s a very different story than the report above. The thing only cuts out a single piece of acrylic, and then drops prefabricated parts on top of it, connecting them together thick ugly blobs of solder paste. It doesn’t do any of the hard manufacturing at all.

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In fact… I hate to call fraud here, but can anyone explain how this could possibly work when these “traces” are clearly bridged in multiple places.

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Wow. That’s super cool!

And as a bonus, @bailey invited me to check out Glowforge during one of the ads!

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