Fibre Laser Hits The Fleet

A box of aluminum business card blanks (anodised) and a fibre laser. Tonights experiment.

Today I acquired a fibre laser. Its a type of laser engraver that works via a galvanometer rather than moving laser head, w/ the burning power courtesy of a loop of fibre-optic cable with a bit of magic dirt in it (e.g. doped). Mine is 20W of output power, enough to engrave stainless steel, aluminum, etc.

It arrives, I unbox, boom. I’m staring at the completely undocumented SeaCAD software. Most of it is translated to English. Its got a few comical things (press the ‘red’ button and it changes status to ‘being red’). This software is very complex. The laser inherently has many degrees of freedom (frequency, pulse width, modulation, duration, power, …). There’s no ‘engrave aluminum’ button.

First shot i tried a business card. Its going to take a bunch of tuning to get this right. A task for another day.