Monthly Archives: June 2012

Testing laser cutter

Here’s a Raspberry Pi case I’ve made using the laser cutter. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, and I’ve got to tune it more to see exactly which power levels I need etc. For this cut, it didn’t cut through the acrylic on all the parts, so I had to break off some of it. Better next time. (The design is from Ladyada, and you can buy a version from there.)

And here’s a picture of the result of trying to make some solder stencils. The picture shows the result of different power settings, with the optimal being circled in black. The optimal seemed to be 10% speed, 20% power with a wet paper below. There are probably many other configurations that would work, like for example lower power and lower speed.

Raspberry PI arrived

Finally, seemingly several months after I ordered, the Raspberry PI has arrived. It seems to work well. I’ve connected it up to my home theatre, but haven’t done extensive testing yet. I’m going to try to play around with the IO ports to see if I can make something useful with it.

Here is  a good link with info on the GPIO pins.

And here is a link with info on how to set up a lightweight web server called nginx (the instructions has a bug, as you have to add sudo somewhere it’s not stated).

Laser cutter has arrived

The laser cutter has arrived. Unfortunately, the laser tube was broken (only a small crack, but that was enough). The FSLaser guys seem to be giving very good support. They’re shipping me a new one, including a new power supply. I’m quite impressed with FSLaser and I’m very happy I bought from them instead of maybe a slightly cheaper vendor. The key benefit with the FSLaser seems to be their printer driver, which you only get on more expensive lasers. You can print directly from your drawing program to the laser. Secondly, they really bundle everything you need into the package.

So unfortunately it’ll take a while before I can test it properly, but at least it’s now in my lab.

Below is a very short video showing the laser inside the box. The build quality seems very good. I think the laser itself is built in China, and FSLaser has just added the driver board to it.

 

Anaren AIR module

I have a small project for a customer who wants to make a device using Low-Power radio. I’ve used the Anaren AIR module with an external antenna (the same as the Launchpad RF booster pack, except the antenna). It seems to work pretty well. With Anaren’s own antenna (a small wire), I’ve tested up to 400 meters range. With larger antennas, I expect it to have even higher range. I used Seeedstudio to make the PCBs. Good quality and good support.

I got the Eagle library for the Anaren AIR module from Anaren. The library is here.