Building a laser engraver, Part 2

While waiting for my L-Cheap 3.5W laser to arrive, I decide to fit my layer engraver with a drawing head so I can test the software toolchain. I hooked up two 12v solenoids to the hotend port of the Azteeh X5 controller board. The Smoothieboard firmware has an option to define “Switches“, these are very handy and allows you to make pretty much anything base on the Smoothieboard hardware. Kudos for that.

Solenoids make really poor linear motion systems, and also they get very hot very quickly (hot enough to deform PLA). I never intended on building a drawbot, this was a fun weekend project. I might design a better drawhead in the future, based on a servo rather than solenoids.

Anyway, here is the first and last “print” of the LazyGecko drawbot, sped up x4.

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