I built a laser cutter! Specifically the Lasersaur, which is a professional grade open-source project. The idea is to use it to make more wooden topo maps, sell them on commission, and once I make enough to cover the cost of the machine, finally get around to making an physical version of my recreation of […]

When building the Lasersaur laser cutter, a resource that was super helpful for me was Chris Derossi’s excellent post on his own cost breakdown. I figured it’s be useful to add another datapoint. I’ll summarize a few things here, but for details you can download my BOM spreadsheet with detailed per-item costs and purchase links […]

The Lasersaur build guide gives you a well-performing machine that can control your laser beam and put it anywhere on the cutting bed that you need it. But it conspicuously leaves out instructions for hooking up a lot of the auxiliary equipment needed to run the machine, and for designing a solution to pumping out […]

As is, the Lasersaur I built comes with a very capable interface, but along with the hardware mods there were a few tweaks to the UI and machine behavior that I wanted to make. Unfortunately it seems that the original software repository is no longer being maintained, as there are some bugfix pull requests that […]