New high power diode laser being offered on AliExpress

Thank you very much for your explanation!

This makes clear that diode lasers can be very capable of doing excellent engraving, but lack completely at efficient cutting.

With the great effort you have put in your build, you are able to get vey nice results (between borders of your expectations). That’s perfect.

But buyers should be warned that they can NOT just buy a cheap diode laser and expect to get the results that they are advertisiing. That’s why the more experienced mods on this forum are a bit “alergic” to such advertizements :triumph:

By the way:
You can get a K40 (35W) CO2 Laser for about 400-450$.
A “half way decent” (lack of full case) laser engraver with enough power (like a ORTUR Laser Master 2 Pro 20W) cost about the same price.

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Thanks for the heads up. Life got super busy for me and I was pretty disappointed in my lack of ability to really cut anything, even really thin material with this. I didn’t grok/anticipate the carbinization effect and just assumed 10x the passes meant 10x the cutting and I could be patient … that didn’t work out. 10x the passes means 10x the burning. :slight_smile: So the whole thing is just sitting here in a corner right now. blah. along with so many of my other interests and hobbies. My thinking for now is I want to explore lightburn’s supposed support for oversize material and repositioning and cutting in chunks. That could be useful for at least tracing out accurate cut lines on a large sheet of foamboard (or multiple sheets taped together for something really big.) Then I could make the actual cut by hand … which is ok because a blade cut means no burning/melting at the edges and better final look for the model.

In the meantime I got myself totally distracted with porting my Arduino flight controller firmeware (running on diy self built hardware) to the ardupilot AP_HAL layer so it can run on any ardupilot compatible flight controller. That lets me escape from the hardware business (which is fun, but no time …) and why didn’t I do that sooner?

But that has led to several coding adventures … I overhauled my proprety tree system (shared higherarchical data structure between modules or even python/c++ hybrid apps.) which I had been wanting to do for some time. Now I rewrote it as a thin layer on top of rapidjson (for all the backend dynamic tree management) and added a pybind11 wrapper for python. The previos version was written in python with a brittle/tricky #include <Python.h> api layer to expose the system to c++.

And I have a packet messaging system (for serial communication) where the messages are defined in a json file and I autogen code for python and c++ (similar to mavlink, but lite, lite, lite.) And I did a whole bunch of refactoring and improving of that system to be more dynamic, handle larger packet sizes, and be more efficient to run on more constrained embedded systems. That was a big side destraction.

And then … with all of that i place, it means I can move a boatload of functionality from the host comptuer over to the flight controller and ultimately build much more compact uav integrations … but migrating code takes time.

So now I’m back to having my little breadboard prototype collection of hardware bits that is almost ready to go back into an airplane and see if I can connect all the dots of all the changes end to end and make it fly …

And if all that works, then I have my next round of code to migrate from the host computer over to the flight controller … and if that works, then I’ll be nearly setup to fly quads or tricopters from my system.

So anyway, that’s how I’ve been spending my spare time this summer …

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Just want to say that some of these chinese firm really like to exaggerate the capabilities of their machines. In a recent ad from Banggood a firm claimed their 5 watt diode laser is equivalent to a 90 watt laser. If that isn’t a stretch I don’t know what is.

but it is true if the 90W laser has a focused dot 1cm across. LOL