Hi,

This is going to be the last update on Kickstarter.

We have pretty much moved on to lasersaur.com and commenced the beta phase about 10 days ago.

If you are a beta supporter and haven't received an invite to the mailing list please let us know and we'll send out another one.

The good news is, we are now onto v0.3 of the Lasersaur system!

Check out the video! (and http://log.lasersaur.com for ongoing build documentation)

There is still some waiting for parts (specifically limit switch mounts, laser tube mounts, paneling etc) until what we hope will be the final testing before we can finalize the alpha kits! The goal is for the kits to be shipped to backers by mid-March and have the community up and running sometime around then as well. The time then, is near!

Now, some details and versions updates:

First and most exciting perhaps is the actual laser has arrived! (oh how we love them):

We decided to do our initial testing with a 40W tube, it will cut enough to tell whats working and not, but isn’t strong enough to burn down to our neighbors below. Surprisingly, it shipped super fast, taking only four days to arrive from mainland China--quite phenomenal... This makes us quite confident that the 100W tubes will be quite painless to source as well.

As you can see, it sort of looks like a transparent missile, so we are going to give China cred for that one:

Also, in order to speed up testing we went ahead and ordered a water chiller. It uses a fan to cool the water as it is pumped through a long helical pipe. This should work well until we design our own water chiller.

We also updated the idler shafts. The older v0.2 idler shaft on the left, new one on the right (using cantilever pin with retaining ring)

Next you can see the new v0.3 drive shaft. They connect the y-axis stepper to the left and right drive belt. There is a step from 8mm to 6mm which makes positioning the ball bearing trivial and hopefully eliminates a possible building error.

Also, SOFTWARE: Finally, the first lines of firmware have been written and the the bare bone gantry is moving sweetly. So we have started writing some code, talking about it and so on and so fourth. Due to overwhelming push from the community we decided to use GCode as the core protocol. Developing different ways of talking to the system will be based off of that and we are very open to more input on this... We also feel the machine should handle dxf and svg files directly (thoughts? discuss.)

And, if you are still with us, we decided to send some schwag along with the kits, so look out for a little extra something something to feed your inner Lasersaur with . . .

More soon...(er).

Friends, Backers, Community-

Let the real fun begin.

We’ve had a few weeks of ordering parts for our prototype, have started to work out the design, and plans for the Alpha kits. We’ve already received some shipments and have been geeking out beyond measure in our lair.

We're super excited to be working on the Lasersaur. Consider us hired! We expected the funding we received to come mostly from our immediate community and a handful of generous believers. We ended up being funded over 200% by individuals worldwide who share the vision of open souce fabrication. Rock!

As we go we will be posting updates on the kickstarter page as well as at the following url which is the new home of the project:

http://lasersaur.com/

With 300+ supporters we feel we should get the conversation going soon. Please stand by as we prepare the grounds for this group of people to come together. Collaboration FTW!

We have had a lot of people want to support this project since it closed. If you are one, please contact us- we have lots of ways you can continue to support and help the Lasersaur.

We want laser cutters and personal fabrication systems to be as mainstream as desktop printers. To us this is a worthy goal because it lays the grounds for wide-spread open source hardware. For all of you who came along we hope you’re excited as we are. We are looking forward to geeking out with all of you and building a solid machine.

More soon,
Cut on!

T minus 2 weeks! We are very glad to see such enormous interest and are excited to get the project out to the community.

We have had a chance to talk to a lot of you and are currently finalizing the specs. We are designing for a 1250x750mm (49x29") cutting area with the option to push through long work pieces and cut in multiple steps.

We are aiming for a lot of flexibility when it comes to installing different kinds of lasers. We want to have the possibility to install anything from low powered lasers to compact high-performance RF lasers and large-scale DC laser tubes. The frame configuration we came up with scales nicely and will natively be able to mount <1.8m tubes.

Our current timeline is set to start the Alpha stage by the end of the year. A few month later we will move on with the Beta stage and no later than summer 2011 this project should go fully open source with all the documentation nicely packaged and illustrated (with a legendary community).

The Kickstarter funding runs until July 8. If you haven't yet but want to become part of the community of early adopters, now is your chance! Please consider pledging and getting Alpha or Beta access. Your contribution will help the community and the mission of open source goodness tremendously.

Thanks everybody for pledging! Lasersaur is quickly developing a strong community and we're looking forward to what awesome things are going to be made from the community of users.

This is just a quick update on the Alpha Kit. We have had quite a few people who want to get started with building the Lasersaur as soon as possible (which is rad). This means the community will get started as soon as we complete testing of the first prototype, compile all the documentation and send out the Alpha Kits. We are hoping there will be quite some synergism, tinkering and good discussion from people starting to build at the same time. We already have a great community of like-minded developers who have come together as a result of our kickstarter who are willing to lend their expertise in all areas. This will be fun!

We also had a chance to narrow down the details of the kit content. We basically want to include all the custom parts plus a lot of smaller otherwise tedious-to-source parts (like ball bearings, screws, plugs, and cables). Also, definitely expect the Lasersaur custom controller board and custom assembly pieces in the kit. For all the remaining parts (laser tube, frame/case, and stepper motors) we will provide supplier lists and plans. Initially we will make sure that parts can be easily sourced in the US and Europe and hope we can extent the lists for worldwide sourcing as we go.

If you have questions feel free to message us directly through kickstarter. (We'll trying to get back to you within a few days)

This looks like a resounding go! We are super excited!
Thanks to your support this will be the summer of the Lasersaur.

Addie did an interview with Makezine. It has lots of good questions and answers. Check it out: Makezine Interview

Ok, back to the secret lair, I feel I have work to do ...

Thanks everyone for your support! We're already past 50% funded! Sweet!

We are super excited to start the build process and get the alpha out to the community ASAP.

The last few days we have had a pretty lively discussion on the various gantry assemblies. We have homed in on a custom designed assembly that can roll on standard t-slot aluminum extrusion. This would have several advantages. It's cheaper, easier to source worldwide, and simpler to assemble. We are also looking into special v-rail, t-slot systems, assuming they are widely sourcable they could be exactly the answer to the system.

We are also playing with a modified RepRap approach and believe this could be unbeatable. We like how they constrain motion. This with timing belts might meet all the requirements to make this easy, cool, and repeatable.

More updates to follow soon! Please feel free to comment with any suggestion or feedback, they are very helpful for the community.

Keep spreading the word!

Hi everybody, We have received a lot of positive feedback and are super excited to find so many like-minded people. Obviously there is a certain style to making this project happen. A large part is technical but the other part is bringing interested people together and producing killer documentation. In the end this is about demystifying a technology and making laser cutters simple (read: cheap, stackable and awesome).

We will be posting updates and details as we go. To start things off, here is a diagram of the basic Lasersaur components. We are looking at using OSC over Ethernet as the main interface of the machine. This might be surprising but has the big advantage that it will make it super simple to talk to the machine from all kinds of computers and programming languages. Rather than thinking of it as a device where you load your files to for cutting we want to push the idea of thinking of it as a robotic extension.

What this means is direct control from software in real-time. While we are big on having lightweight Blender and Rhino plugins we also want to be able to easily control the machine with any custom app (think Processing, OpenFrameworks, VirtualAwesome). Currently we are working on hooking up a tablet which controls Lasersaur in real-time.

In the diagram there is also something called the "Lasersaur App". It is an open source cross-platform app with bare essentials for cutting design files. As for the types of supported files we still haven't narrowed our choices down (but welcome request). Check back as we will post more details of the Lasersaur App soon.

Please keep spreading the word, blog, twitter, facebook. The project depends on your support and belief in livin' the dream.

Thanks again for your interest!