Daniel's Laser Lab

"What's cooking in the lab?"

My laser lab is a collection of laser-cut components, cases and artwork together with python library code that is used to parametrise some of the designs.

Throughout the lab the functional elements of a design (such as the cuts needed to make a case for a board) are rendered geometrically in python. In contrast the artistic elements (e.g. artwork on the top of a case) are added afterwards, extending the SVG emitted by the python code by drawing directly on top using Inkscape. Both the underlying code and the final machine ready art are included in this repo.

The laser library

The laser library is at the heart of almost all the designs here. It is basically a collection of small extensions to the svgwrite library to reduce the amount of boiler plate needed to express a design.

The most complex component is the util.Turtle which allows an SVG path to be described using turtle graphics rather than having to express everything as X-Y coordinates and vectors. I found design elements such as rounded edges are much easier to express using the turtle.

The other utilities are effectively just time-savers to allow various SVG transformation operations to be expressed more compactly.

See laser/ for the laser library code.

Cases for 96Boards products

Sandwich-style cases are especially well suited as cases for 96Boards Consumer Edition and Iot Edition and, also benefit from being very easy to manufactures with a laser cutter. Even better both these 96Boards editions have aggressive height limits across the whole board resulting in an acceptably small number of layers when designing a board side protection. This results in a simple, robust and easy to handle enclosure with a simple bolt together design.

The Consumer boards in particular have lots of connectivity options making open sided cases (or part open sided) cases desirable. This is also easily managed by taking care in the design of the sandwich layers.

See 96boards/ to see all the available case options for 96Boards products.

Miscellaneous parts

There is a small selection of components that I have designed to "hack things better". Many of these are components I used to improve my own laser cutter.

Most of the parts are explained, on an individual basis, in the comments at the top of the python file.

See parts/ for a complete listing.

Artwork

I cut most of my designs on my home laser cutter and generally do very short runs (sometimes only one). This means my designs can be free of any commercial constraints imposed on laser cutting services. For example, many commercial cutting operations end up charging for "laser time" which often makes raster engraving (which is typically very slow) un-economic. In fact even complex raster engraving can end up having a big impact on the cutting time.

For that reason most of the designs found elsewhere in the lab are primarily functional. I do add design flourishes, especially rounded corners, but even these mostly blend function and form (sharp corners hurt). Elsewhere in the lab things are utilitarian and would be suitable for commercial runs in small(ish) batches.

The art/ section is different. In this corner of the lab you can get a glimpse of the final machine ready artwork that I actually cut. These are typically copied from other parts of the lab and then hand edited in Inkscape to add the artistic flourishes that make the designs come alive.

Note: Whilst the lab as a whole is licensed under CC BY 4.0 the art section makes extensive use of Openclipart. The underlying clipart is dedicated to the public domain (CC0) by its authors and can be freely downloaded from https://openclipart.org .

License