Mini-laser-cutter

This is a mini desktop laser cutter that I put together using spare parts from around my studio. I already had the laser module, and the driver boards came from an old laser projector, so I built this as a small test bed to see what it could do.

The main goal was to experiment with cutting low-density foam and possibly paper. It worked well enough for those materials, but since I already had access to a large-format laser cutter, this was never really meant to become a primary tool. Instead, it became a useful little platform for testing ideas and trying out small-scale workflows.

I used it for a variety of experiments, including exploring whether it could be used to create flexible PCB cutouts as an alternative to the small plotter cutter I had available. I was also interested in using the laser to cure inks on copper plates, with the goal of testing whether those cured inks could function as a resist for low-barrier PCB etching workflows.