Intro

[Jeff Evans]

Hi,
I am an engineer by degree, a program manager by profession, and have been doing product design and development for 26+ years now. The business I own is relatively new - est. 2017. It was set up to hold a patent I now own. One thing led to another and now I own two CNC tables. One is used for milling and routing, the other is used for laser engraving.

I'm here to learn and possible contribute to the knowledge base. There's a lot of content out there for CO2 lasers, but I haven't seen much in the way of diode lasers. So maybe I can use my engineering background to post my lessons learned with this laser technology. I'm working on a laser dot focus whitepaper now to help people with calibrating their diode (or other) laser dot sizes. It uses Russ's dotsize.bmp file, and was what brought me to this forum to begin with.

Cheers!
Jeff

[Gene Uselman]

Welcome Jeff- I am not well versed on diode lasers but it is getting to be a thing. I have recently been looking at the Laserpecker 2 which I am told is a diode laser and seems to have the optics of a fiberlaser- I plan to learn more and we welcome any help we can get. Gene

[Tim Mellor]

Welcome along. As an EE the level of BS and 'power' of a lot of the Diode Lasers sold on Aliexpress/Evilbay is a problem to overcome before you get to the practical real limits of the technology.

Back when I started looking at Lasers I seriously considered Diode ones for their simplicity but on looking at how much power was actually available I went down the CO2 path. Not to say they don't have there place I had some fun playing with a little 0.5W one on a 3D printer and it worked ok on engraving and very light cutting.

[Jeff Evans]

Hi everyone - Thanks for replying.
I agree, Diode lasers are a nice way to enter into the realm of lasers from both a cost and simplicity standpoint. My Diode laser is from J Tech Photonics and does well. I just completed my DOE for optimizing dot size, and I could publish this document here on this forum if someone points me to an appropriate location. I am able to get to about 0.2mm resolution with a high resolution lens. Not super great, but a nice entry point into the tech.

Diode lasers are not good for trying to cut wood thicker than a few mm (or 1/8" or so). Definitely not in a production setting - takes too long. But they are decent at creating images on wood products (my experience so far), or cutting out patterns in paper and such. My next effort will be to work with Acrylic. Eventually, I see me upgrading to a CO2 laser system for cutting ability. Need a bigger shop for that though!