Pledges/Frikkin Laser

The blue box laser cutter I have on loan to the space has been on its last legs for a while, and maintenance is becoming a total nightmare. It's time to replace it with a newer model.

Since we’re updating, we might as well get something bigger and better! I’ve been looking into various options, and the best one for us seems to be a Chinese 6040 Laser Cutter, like the following:



This laser has the following good stuff:
 * A 600mm x 400mm bed size (4 times the area of our current laser).
 * A 50W tube, allowing us to cut thicker material, up to around 12mm deep.
 * Air assist, red dot pointer and a HoneyComb Bed.
 * A height-adjustable bed, to allow engraving on super thick materials (up to 250mm deep).
 * A rotary axis for engraving on bottles and other round stuff!

I’ve recently been over to Leeds Hackspace, who have bought the 60W version of this laser cutter for their hackspace and wanted it upgraded with a LAOS board. The cutter seemed very well made, and came with all the bells and whistles I had to add myself to the old laser. Conversion to LAOS took around 5 hours total, and was up and running right away.

The total for buying the laser cutter, and replacing the electronics with the LAOS board we currently use is £1600. Whatever you give will be matched with laser time on the new cutter - If you give £100 you’ll get £100 of credit automatically! I’m going to start the pledging off at £200 because i’m pretty cool like that.

Goals

 * £1600 - 50W 6040 Laser Cutter
 * £1900 - we can afford to up the anti and get the 60W version! This would allow faster cutting, and thicker materials.
 * £1950 - Upgraded (external) stepper drivers, will allow us to move the X and Y axes faster, allowing for significantly faster engraving.
 * £2100 - Build a wheely base, including an overhead gantry, raspberry pi b+ and pi cam to use visicut's awesome [camera positioning] functionality.

Pledges
Total - £2150

Payment
Please transfer your pledge to the Hackspace bank account, with the reference ZAPPYZAP