Laser Cutting
I got into this mostly as part of designing my cyberdeck.
The plans I designed in OpenSCAD were made to be laser cut, and some of the features I include are only really practical with laser cut boards.
"Living Hinges", in particular, require even spacing and narrow kerfs. Lots of long cuts on increasingly unstable wood.
Products of interest
xTool D1 Pro
- 10W laser with shielded module
- Ultra-thin kerf
- Might not support LaserGRBL?
- Easier to ship?
My setup
I got the xTool D1 Pro
Created a udev rule for more consistent device mapping, making lightburn easier to use
After a lot of trial and error, I think I nailed this down. Long story short, you will need to create a udev rule to allow the controller in the laser to talk to your program.
By default, the serial connection is only available to the root user. To allow all users to have access, you can create a "plugdev" group and create a udev rule that gives access to all users in the group. The arch wiki has a good breakdown on udev if you want to dive deeper - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/udev
Manjaro setup
- Create "plugdev" group - groupadd plugdev
- Add your user to the plugdev group - sudo usermod -a -G plugdev yourusername
- Add udev rule -
- cd /etc/udev/rules.d
- sudo nano 00-XtoolD1.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="tty", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"
- Save and exit by pressing ctrl+x