Step 1

Formulating A Plan

Building on top of our CD-Rom Drive CNC machine (having already turned it into a 3D printer), the plan is to make a laser engraver/cutter. The hope is to scavenge a laser from one of our CD/DVD drives that we tore apart to make our CNC machine and use it to cut or engrave material. After extracting it, we’ll need to create a laser driver for it, an adustable lens to focus the laser, and a switch mechanism that allows us to turn it on and off using our Arduino.

First things first, before moving on you’ll have to have already finished my previous guide for making a CNC machine from old CD-Rom drives. Click below to go to it:

CD-Rom Drive CNC Machine

Step 2

Extracting The Laser

This step is going to have to remain very vague due t0 the fact that there are so many different makes and models of optical drives, so your experience will most likely differ from mine. But here’s the basic rundown:

Remove the outer screws casing of the Optical Drive
Remove the tray panel (simply slide up to get it off) and front panel (usually has side clips that hold it in place)
Remove any connecting circuit board ribbons and then remove the circuit boards.
This should leave you with the plastic disc drive base and the metal slider with the laser
Remove the metal slider tray screws and rubber inserts and then extract the slider tray.
There should be a screw or clip that holds the guide poles in place. Remove that to remove the poles and slide the laser carriage away from the slider tray.
The laser carriage will have lenses, mirrors, and at least one laser inside of it. Be careful removing it’s components.
The laser is generally located on the side of the carriage with three pins soldered to a ribbon or circuit board. Disconnect any circuitry and gently remove the laser from the carriage.

Just like optical drives, the types of lasers within them vary greatly. But I’ve found there are two main types of lasers: round and flat. I’ve included the pinouts below for the different types of lasers.

Round Laser Pinout	Flat Laser Pinout

Once you have identified what type of laser you have and how the pins are laid out, we next need to solder longer wire leads to the positive and negative terminals. We will also need some type of adjustable lens so that we can adjust the focus of the beam and a casing. The easiest thing to do is to purchase a laser module housing like this one from Amazon and then just mount your laser into it. Now we need a way to power it.

Soldering Wires To The Laser	Inserting The Laser Into A Housing

Step 3

Creating A Laser Driver

So if the last step wasn’t hard enough, we now need to create a laser driver to power the laser. It is possible to power a laser by just attaching it to 3v batteries, but this is not recommended because it will likely burn out your laser. The laser driver creates a fixed, consistent current to power the laser for long periods of time. Here are the components you will need for creating a laser driver:

LM317 Voltage Regulator
2 – 10 Ohm resistors
100 Ohm Variable Resistor
1N4007 Diode
10uf Capacitor
5v Relay (For switching through an Arduino)

The LM317 voltage regulator is used to create a consistent voltage stream to the laser. The current to the laser can be adjusted by adding resistors to the middle pin, and if you want to tweak the resistance for different lasers, you can use a 100 ohm variable resistor. You can use the chart on the left to determine how much power you want for your laser. Then add a diode to make sure the current only flows one direction, and a capacitor to prevent current fluctuations. Use the Fritzing diagram below to see how it’s all laid out (click on it to download the schematic).

Step 4

Creating An Image For Burning

MORE COMING SOON!

How To (And How Not To) Make A Cheap Laser Engraver

Tinkernut Labs

Basic overview of what we will be doing

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