Kickstarter

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!