Versa Laser Cutter

The laser cutter (VersaLaser) is in the fourth floor robotics lab (where the SECON team meets). This is useful for cutting holes in plastic enclosures (such as those from www.boxenclosures.com) or for making your own enclosures from acrylic.

The Verslaser acts like a printer, so any vector graphic that you draw can be 'printed' onto a surface, either etched or cut through. The easiest way to make a pattern is to use Visio from Microsoft.

To prepare a drawing, do the following in Visio:

• Create a new drawing in US units. You will probably want to have fixed grid for your drawing. Use Tools>Ruler&Grid and set Grid to 'Fixed' and set your minimum grid size (i.e, 0.01 inches). Here are some samples: sample1, sample2.
• For now, your page size can be anything -- it will have to be changed once your file is loaded into Visio on the computer running the laser cutter. The maximum material size handled by the laser cutter is 12" x 24".
• For lines/geometry that you want burned by the laser cutter, set them as color 'Red', with custom line weight of "0 in" (select line, right click Format>Line, in color box select "RED"; in the same menu, choose the 'Weight' box, select 'Custom', and enter a custom line weight of "0 in"). Any other lines that you need for reference, make them either blue or black (these will be skipped during the laser burn).
• The best way to draw geometry is to make the dimensions relative to some border that you draw. If you are cutting a rectangle with other cut-outs (circles, rectangles, etc) within the rectangle, then reference all of your drawing to some corner/position in your rectangle. It is very difficult to have the laser go to an absolute location due to imprecise placement of the material inside the Versa laser cutter, but the laser is very precise in relative movements.
• If you must have absolute coordinates: the lower left-hand corner of the page is the lower left hand corner of the laser 'burn' area, so reference everything from there. The laser cutter has a X,Y offset of -0.3", -0.125" so you have to add these offset values to your drawing. The easiest way to do this is to first draw all of your vectors normally referencing the lower-left hand corner as 0,0. After your drawing is finished, group everything together. Then select it, and subtract 0.3" from the X coordinate, and subtract 0.125" from the Y coordinate. This will move everything to the left and down slightly. If your drawing is close to the bottom of the page, it may look like part of your drawing is "off-page", but do not worry about this.

At this point your drawing is ready to be "burned". Put it on a USB drive, and contact Mr. Hamilton (jhamilton AT ece DOT msstate DOT edu) to do the burning. Bring the material that you wish to use or use the department-provided supply -- it is good to have extra material in case something goes wrong. You should also bring some heavy stock paper if you want to 'test' the cutting before you try cutting the real material. Do not put multiple drawing sheets in the same file; instead, use a separate file for each drawing sheet. Do not use 'raster' images in your drawing - everything should be a line drawing.

Materials:

The ECE department has some Acrylic sheets available for each team. If the Senior Design team should need more than what is provided by the ECE department, the material will have to be procured by the team.

Available Material: 12"x 24" X 1/4" Acrylic, 12" x 24" X 3/16" Acrylic and 12" X 24" X 1/8" Acrylic

Note: These are clear sheets.

Acceptable Material:

Cutting: Paper, Card stock, Cardboard, Wood (Pine, Balsa), MDF, Acrylic.

Etching: Glass, Aluminum, Ceramic

Please see Jeremy Hamilton for compatible material thickness.

Links:

Maker Case - Web-based application for laying out project boxes. Very handy application.

Inkscape- Vector graphics program. Freeware and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. This program is good because it will produce SVG files and import directly into Visio.

Microsoft Visio- Visio is the primary software used with the laser cutter.

Instructions for Obtaining MS Visio:

Visio is free for ECE students through the ECE Intranet.

Once you are logged in you will click the MSDNAA-Micorsoft Dreamspark link under Tools.

You will be asked to log in with your Net ID

You should now be on the Microsoft Dreamspark page and see the available software.

Click on the Visio 2013 or 2016, link and click Add to Cart.

Proceed to check out and follow the onscreen instructions.