LASERPEN the LASER PEN

[Music] cool pingu you what's up everyone it's devin here with make anything and i am pretty excited about today's experiment because i made something that i've never seen before and it's super cool some of you might recall my video on the elects cam laser engraver i used it to try to engrave my thumbprint onto a little skateboard and it kind of failed because the software is pretty cruddy and the USB port on the laser engraver broke now that's something that i could have fixed but instead I decided to remix it and with that I made a laser pen laser pen this may look like a ridiculously oversized laser pointer but while your average laser pointer has a power of about five milliwatts this bad boy has a power of five thousand 500 milliwatts it's over a thousand times stronger than your regular laser pointer so it can certainly do some damage but it can also do some really cool things the idea is that I want to have the power of a laser cutter with the artistry of a handheld pen to be able to engrave things like wood or acrylic or whatever you can burn with a laser so let's go ahead and take a closer look at what went into making this and of course let's see what it can do so here's the original laser engraver and while you usually use it with the software if you just turn it on it'll automatically go to a full powered laser and then there's these two buttons on top one that switches between the full power and a weak power and then the other one that turns everything on and off so I figured with just those options that's already enough to kind of make a laser pen without having to connect this to my computer or anything first I decided to test out the laser to see how strong it is considering it is running at full power all the time so I want to make sure it's not gonna immediately catch things on fire and when I'm testing it on this piece of pine it seems to be working really well I'm moving rather slow and you can see it's making a nice dark solid line great so with that it seems like the laser will work for purpose so I'm just gonna go ahead and start dismantling this machine I'll start by taking off this laser module it's just connected with these four machine screws and then I'll unplug the motors and unwrap the wires and basically get rid of everything that I don't need until I'm left with just the essentials this module that holds the laser and has a fan to cool it down as well as this little circuit board that I'll just use to turn it on and off now I'll go ahead and plug this laser in and see if I can actually draw with it just holding the big block of a laser module because I want to take baby steps I don't want to get carried away and model this whole thing without knowing that it'll sort of work already so I'm just gonna go ahead and try drawing on this piece of pie and it's got this interesting knot in the wood so I'm gonna turn that into an eyeball cool so you can see it's working but the problem here and the reason that I want to make a pen is that I'm kind of just hovering my hand over the board and that makes it really hard to draw a clean line and I think would be a lot easier to be able to have a pen and place the tip down on the wood so that I can get more steady lines I found this pen that I had lying around and it's got a metal body so I figured it might make the ideal barrel to shoot my laser through so I went ahead and opened it up and took out all the insides so I'm just left with this metal tube and the idea is basically to just put that at the end of this laser so that I have something skinnier to hold it than this giant block that is the module again I want to test things out before I commit to actually modeling this whole thing so I'm just gonna go ahead and do a really quick and dirty prototype by literally taping the pen to the laser so that I can get an idea of what that feels like in my hand and see if it's too heavy or if I'm actually able to draw cleanly and sure enough it seems pretty good so let's do it the other thing I wanted was an easier way to switch between the weak and powerful laser rather than just pressing this button which would be kind of difficult while I'm holding the pen so I found this mechanical shutter release cable which is normally used for photography but I figured it's perfect for pressing the button from a distance basically I want to hold the laser pen in my right hand and this shutter release in my left hand to press that button and switch between burning and not burning giving me a little more control with this laser pen with that I had a pretty solid idea of what I wanted so I went into fusion 360 and started modeling everything out I started by modeling the laser module itself and then around that I built my fixture that's gonna hold it to the pen and hold everything together nice and rigid so that I don't end up burning my face off with a laser and there we have it laser pen version 1.0 so there it is it looks pretty good let's go ahead and print this thing out I wanted to print this in ABS so it's nice and sturdy and that's why you can see this ridiculous enclosure I built or tracks m200 basically just using the packaging supplies that came with the printer and surprisingly it worked really well reducing all of that warping that I would have had otherwise after about 18 hours of printing here it is in all its glory so I'll just go ahead and use my scraper to pop this thing off the printer and we'll go ahead and start removing all of the support material and there was quite a bit because in this case I really prioritized making a good sturdy design versus making something that's super easy to print once we've got all that support off we can go ahead and add that pen barrel and it slips in there pretty darn good although I will slip this little rubber band around the top just to make sure the pen really holds in place so the pen part works great now it's time to slip in that big laser module as you can see it's a really tight fit which is great because obviously I don't want this thing wiggling around at all and just to make sure it's completely secure I'm still gonna put in those four machine screws through the holes that are already on the module well screw those in nice and tight and now we have a completely rigid structure which is exactly what we want okay so now the pen and the laser should be perfectly aligned and believe it or not for how chunky this thing is it's actually pretty comfortable that flat side rests against my hand quite nicely and it doesn't feel too heavy before we attach the next part let's just do a quick test to make sure that this is actually working so at first I was definitely getting a really bright laser but I wasn't getting any burning I'm hoping that the laser just isn't quite focused so I'm gonna go ahead and carefully turn this lens cap on the laser which adjusts the focus distance and I'm gonna try to set it to be the tiniest dot possible right at the tip of the pen after a bit of tuning now we're seeing smoke and sure enough it's engraving my wood awesome by the way I didn't show it yet but I am wearing the appropriate laser goggles cuz this thing would fry my retinas pretty quickly let's go ahead and do one more quick test on cardboard and see if we can burn a little image on there so it's interesting you can actually hold the pen too close and it won't burn but if I come away just a tiny bit I start getting that engraving so once again it's just a matter of focusing the point of the laser to be right where I want it to be I went ahead and just drew this funky dude as a quick little test and I mean it works it works we have a laser pen this is a whole laser pen so let's just go ahead and add that second part I designed that little remote trigger so that I can turn the laser on and off and hopefully get more control with this laser pen I'll go ahead and take that part and snap it right on to the fan as I designed it and then I'll take their release cable and thread it into this tiny hole that I made just slightly smaller so that it kind of threads itself it's a really nice strong tight fit and when I press the release cable sure enough I can hear that button clicking that's a great sign so let's go ahead and try it all together on this scrap piece of plywood we've got the laser and sure enough I can turn it on and off with this remote trigger that's awesome okay time to draw just as I was hoping this release cable makes it really easy to turn the laser on and off which gives me a lot more control when I'm drawing with my laser pen the smoke was a bit much though so I'm gonna attach this little fan onto my desk and hopefully that'll help a little bit and let's keep working as you can probably tell my lines are already a lot cleaner than when I was just holding on to that laser module so I'd already call this a definite success and from here I'm only gonna continue making small adjustments and figuring out how to best use this laser pen on this piece of plywood I just decided to try out a bunch of different drawing techniques to see if I could shade and draw thick lines and thin lines and everything seemed to work really well although I did notice after a while it seemed like the pen barrel was getting filled with smoke and that was making the laser weaker so in the name to fix that my next modification was to cut some little slots into the front of this pen barrel and help it get a little bit more airflow so I just used a metal saw here and cut these slots about halfway through the pen and I made several of them all the way down and there we go it's just a little adjustment but hopefully that will help get the smoke out of there a little quicker let's snap it back in and keep working yeah now it seems to be working a little bit better seems like that little modification did the trick I went on and on did all kinds of different patterns because I'm really just trying to get used to this laser pen and figure out all the characteristics about this new medium that I'm working with if I were to compare this to something I'd guess it's kind of similar to using a tattoo gun now I haven't given any tattoos but that's just my feeling based on the fact that I've got this pen that's got some weight on it and that I just have to be very careful and it draws these really thin lines the power of this laser is really pretty impressive even holding the pen far away from its ideal focal point I was still able to burn the wood and get some thicker lines and get some interesting shading also at this distance you can actually see the laser and of course that's really awesome but you can also see all that smoke that's coming off the wood so from now on I'm gonna use this respirator to really make sure that I'm not breathing in all these terrible fumes next I decided to try my first more finished piece so I decided to draw a jellyfish inspired by my recent visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium I'm drawing this on a spare little slab of bamboo flooring which does have some finish on it so that's why my respirator is especially important when working with these kind of materials in the future I actually think I'll be doing most of my work with this laser outdoors because I want to air things out as much as possible it can't be very good to be breathing this in anyways as you can see the laser pen is working pretty darn well I'm able to get these relatively clean lines and everything's burning nice and dark and creating this really cool image that remote trigger with my left hand works super great and it's very helpful for really quickly turning the laser on and off so that I can have lines overlapping and I can do little thin hatches and all kinds of interesting line work since the laser is focused on one tiny point at the tip of this pen most of the lines are the same little hairline thickness but I found that by going over the same lines multiple times I could get nice thick outlines that helps me make certain things stand out a bit more but I did notice that the laser is a lot brighter when I'm going over a part that already burnt another way of getting thicker and darker lines is just to draw slower because of course that means I'm burning each spot a little longer on the other hand I can also move the pen really quickly and that'll help me get thin lighter lines so that I can kind of shade things in it looks a bit messy and scribbly but depending on the style that I'm going for it could work in this case for adding some shades to the top of this jellyfish and just giving it an appearance of more depth it actually worked pretty well at this point I decided to double up my safety glasses just because that light is so darn bright especially when I'm going over parts that I already did so by having two glasses on it not only hopefully protects my eyes a little better but it helps me see what I'm doing I mean you can see how bright this laser burns even with those two safety goggles on it's still this big white dot where I'm drawing so it's kind of hard to see exactly what I'm doing and I think in the future I might have to wear some welding goggles or something to actually be able to see the point I know these laser goggles are made for these specific lasers but in general I don't think you're supposed to be staring at the laser for this long even when you're wearing those safety goggles so if anyone out there is an expert with lasers please let me know if what I'm doing is safe enough or if I need to be taking any extra precautions as cool as this is it's definitely not worth losing my eyesight all right well let's finish up this jellyfish and the final touch of course will be a little signature down in the corner and there we go my final artwork if you look up close you can see the lines are still kind of messy but it gets the point across and I think with some practice I'll get even better I'm definitely proud of how this came out so there's my first look with the laser pen and for one of my first attempts I think this jellyfish came out looking pretty cool and I'm really excited to get more practice with this and also to use it on some more non-traditional things if you guys have any ideas of what I can laser with this pen let me know in the description I've already got some ideas too so I'm definitely gonna have more videos on this I'm definitely hoping that upgrade it a bit more it's not perfect just yet and yeah so look forward to more laser pen look forward to all kinds of really cool projects here on make anything I try to keep it cool so until next time I'm Devin this is make anything don't forget to stay inspired and wear your safety glasses that's also important with the laser pen [Music] you

Channel: Make Anything

Views: 182,274

Keywords: 3D printed, 3d printing, 3D print, 3d printer, make anything, laser, pen, laserpen, laser drawing, drawing with a laser, laser engraving, handheld, handheld laser, hand held laser, laser art, laser burn, wood burning, tool, DIY, hack, laser burning, drawing, lasers, cool laser, laser cutter, hand, held, cutting, cutter, burning, engraving

Id: UyuvYSAihOw

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018