K40 Laser Beginner Insights draft document from FB K40 group

You would probably have better luck just bending up a sheet metal box the same size, given the cost of shipping etc.

Making a mockup was my first thought. However, I suck at sheet metal work, and not from not having tried repeatedly. I actually have a 24" manual brake in the workshop and don’t trust myself with more than two bends in one piece of metal.
The local sheet metal shops tell me either “go away kid, don’t bother me” or “Great! That’s be $1,000,000.00”.
Then there’s always the fact that internet “experts” will poo-poo a mockup, opining that a mockup isn’t the real thing.
That’s what pushed me into asking.

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@keen: I finally got around to reading your paper. I have to say it is very well done and informative. Years ago I was trying to make a K40 wiki but it never really got off the ground. If you search around, you will find a cornucopia of K40 wikis that have some information but are far from complete. Even though as I stated, there are a bunch of wikis, I still believe that makerforums should try and put together a wiki that at least points people in the direction of finding the information.

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@HalfNormal yup, that’s the plan — @keen is going to send me an updated draft, and I’ll reformat it into markdown to be a “sticky wiki post” here — we’ll make it a pinned topic in this channel, which we can edit together. We can have a “canned response” pointing to it for people who miss it, and we can have one starting point for new/prospective K40 owners that we recommend everywhere.

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@mcdanlj and @keen I am looking forward to the creation of the wiki and looking forward to helping make it the best one out there!

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I’ve emailed the document, updated by appending the cooling and fires pictures. It’s been a Bad Email Day here, and I keep getting bounces. Will retry til I get it there.

Does the forum have an FTP upload that works?

You can upload an odt just like you can upload a pdf. No ftp.

No email arrived yet. [Edit: just arrived]

I’ve been reading through it. I’m getting to the point that pandoc is starting to produce something that looks reasonable. pandoc -f odt -t gfm --wrap=none --extract-media=. --toc -o insights.md K40\ Laser\ Beginner\ Insights\ Makers.odt is getting things in roughly usable initial state.

@keen I’d like to suggest pulling out into a separate topic the idea at the end about another cooling system. The shorter the intro, the more likely it is to be read. :slight_smile:

I’m good with that. I originally made up the cooling appendix and fire photo appendix as separate files. It’s easy to separate them out, other than the references to them in the beginner stuff. I can do that easily enough if you want.

I think the fire stuff is great to have in the initial document.

However, it turns out the maximum size for the maximum size of a document is 99000 characters, and the default maximum size is 32000. I’ll have to make it a little smaller and try again. :slight_smile:

I think it will be possible to restructure it to make it a little smaller after the initial post.

OK, it’s saved, pinned, and a wiki. Go ahead and pull out the ideas for how to create a new cooling system into another post that isn’t in “how to get started” — if it ends up turning into a project that someone could build as a new-to-K40 user, we can link to it. We’re pretty close to the maximum size limit now, so we’ll need to rearrange to make room. :slight_smile:

I’ll go hack on it.

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I think there are areas that can be pared down easily. A quick one is the software section can be shortened and add links to the software.

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How do you know what is changed and how are changes approved?

There is a history of changes with visual diff visible under a pencil icon near the top right, and the wiki can be edited by anyone with trust level 2 or higher. There is no approval process, as there is no approval process with a wiki in general.

I suggest others wait to edit it until @keen is done with his changes though, to keep from colliding. :slight_smile:

Sorry I already did …

Probably we’ll see a typing indicator. I just made a few more changes myself.

@keen I’m thinking that material selection section is another “move to another post and link” candidate. That would give it room to expand, and collect notes on material selection, and link to other documents on the topic; several maker spaces maintain such lists.

While we are sort of on this topic of providing and finding information… and I probably should know this.
Where do resources go on this forum. One thing I liked about G+ was the side bar that had all the links to resources. Is there one place a reader can go to get a list of resources outside of this forum.
Everything we are capturing and summarizing here is already "out there “somewhere”…

We should make a practice of adding high-level resources to the category stickies. There isn’t an analog in discourse for the G+ side bar as far as I know. If you find a plug-in let me know and I can evaluate.

I agree that organization is a big issue. The problem I was trying to solve was that while I do a lot of research on the net to learn, folks on FB can’t be bothered to search anywhere else or are simply too clueless to do so. I was trying to put together a FAQ, but with an index up front, so that if I could get them to look at the index, they might be enticed to read the few-paragraphs of question and answer on the answer to their question, and …maybe… even read a few other bits.
This forum is a different audience, although that probably means that having the skinniest possible index up front, leading to a short few paragraph “answer”, and then a more fully fleshed out explanation that the researchers could process might be a better solution for this group.
So maybe the approach would be to skinny down the master page to one-liner index, leading to a six-paragraph-or-less explanation, with links to several text pages with web links for a deeper explanation. The folks just needing an answer can stop a the level they need. The researchers can bore all the way down to the source links.

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I’ll do some editing today, along those lines unless you have other advice.

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