Im thinking of adding a laser diode for engraving and thin woodcutting in the 6 or 7 watt range to my lead 1010 setup. There is a price difference but what are differences in quality, service, and operating stats that differ, Are both easy to operate with the blackbox ?. what can I not do with one that the other can do ? I have Vcarve pro licenced software for design and now I hear I can purchase the (approx. $50. Vcarve add-on software to operate the laser or purchase lightburn or even use the blackbox software So many options, but an overwhelming learning curve for a newbee If you have nothing better to do this coming weekend how about chiming in to help me make some decisions Thanks much Tom
I think both systems are wildly overpriced vs actually just learning about lasers and using a NUBM44-v2 diode ($150 with lens and housing from DTR) and BlackBuck 8M r3 driver ($60 prewired and heatsunk from Barnett) which is basically what's under the hood of all of these 6-10W kits. My problem with the kits is a) paying $400 for a piece of aluminum, a few extra wires and a pair of safety glasses seems pretty ridiculous, b) most people seem to use them as a circumvention of actually doing the research because they're plug and play, which is pretty terrifying. Even a 2W laser is no joke. The discussion on diodes and what's in all these kits is freely available online, but people don't look, and then come on here asking basic operational questions (eg. about PWM inputs) that, quite frankly, they should have already answered before either buying a laser at all or at least before installation and turning it on. Someone's gonna burn their house down or their eye out one of these days. If you can justify the price in either case, I'd go OptLaser over JTech, pretty much purely for the machined aluminum housings vs 3D printed(?!). Better thermals, better aesthetics, more appropriate to the price bracket of the product. (JTech, if you're reading... At the very least, sand, fill and finish one of your enclosures and mold and cast them in urethane... On-demand print manufacturing is for $30 widgets, not $600 tools!) Software: I'd go Lightburn. I haven't needed to buy software yet, LaserWeb for CAM and bCNC for sending is working great for me, but I try to periodically keep up with the state of laser machines and last I checked, for grbl-based machines Lightburn was rock solid and inexpensive.
No kidding! I've managed to stumble across that thread once a year for the last few years, it's terrifying. I already installed my NUBM44-v2 to replace my NDB7875, just haven't adjusted the BlackBuck current setting yet (need to machine and install a proper heatsink for it first). Considering upgrading my Eagle Pair OD3+'s to OD6, but I also got some JTech shielding and am planning on fully enclosing, since I'm not the only one who uses the basement.
Like the OP, I was looking at the JTech and Opt lasers for an add on to a LEAD machine, if only because they were featured on the part store. Your comment confirms the general impression I was under, that these are expensive wrappers on basic (though dangerous) components. Thank you for sharing the specific part numbers. Beyond following those leads, are there other resources (websites, forums,...) you might recommend to someone interested in learning more about lasers and doing it from the ground up?
I'm assuming that those drop-in units are using custom drivers, to be honest, but they all essentially do the same thing. The BlackBuck is well-regarded by the laser pointer community and has been rock-solid for me (ran into no end of noise trouble trying to use a cheap China driver). You'll probably become reasonably familiar with the Laser Pointer Forums (as Peter links above)- they have a bunch of members who do testbed work, comparing diodes and drivers. The maker websites have some helpful stuff on them, as I recall, DTR is both a seller and a member of those communities. A lot of it is just Googling stuff you come across- single vs multi-mode, for example. This all seems to have been a little easier a few years ago, when BDR-209 (445nm 900mW single mode) vs NDB7879 (405nm 1.7W multi-mode) was one of the big topics of discussion, and often spawned some far-reaching, quite technically enlightening conversation. Now I'm not so sure if the finer points of diode operation are largely passed over in favor of raw power or not, but there are a lot of crazy powerful diodes out there that serve no purpose in a CNC machine. Open-ended questions like "blackbuck vs" can produce some interesting and unanticipated directions, but yeah, in general, it's dependent on your ability to autodidact-by-Google. Much like CNC itself, really.
Well said. Having enough knowledge to know what to search for makes a big difference. Thanks for the topic ideas.
