Here are some nuances that I didn't catch (admittedly, skimming) in the article based on my research and experience owning a diode laser for the last few months.
I'm not usually one to advocate buying things on Amazon, much less using filters, but in this particular case your eyesight is on the line. Unless you know a dealer of the following products that you personally trust, buy on Amazon and sort by "Avg Customer Review". And for the love of God, do your due diligence and take everything you hear about these things with a grain of salt.
First of all, the fireproof fibreglass enclosures generally work fine, but don't trust their tinted plastic windows to protect your eyes. The best practice with these things is to cultivate a habit of always, ALWAYS putting on your goggles before you ever enter the laser room.
If other adults have access to the room it's in, hang a couple pairs on the door with a warning sign to never enter without goggles. Make sure they know the rules.
Children should never, under any circumstance, enter a room containing a diode laser.
If your diode laser came with green goggles, those are almost certainly not good enough. Even if it was an expensive kit you bought. They're still the wrong ones. Look for ones with orange lenses that have video showing their lenses smoking/burning when the laser is pointed at them. And even then, make sure you have an enclosure with orange/brown tinted windows. Consider both proper goggles and the tinted window to be the absolute bare minimum in terms of eye safety.
If you bought a fibreglass enclosure and it came with a fan, it's probably too weak to do the job it needs to do. Get an inline fan that's marketed for growing weed. The diameter of the inlet and outlet ports should be smaller than that of the area within which the fan spins. The ones shaped like a can of beans almost certainly aren't going to be up to the job.
If your enclosure's design / instructions "require" the installation of a computer fan between the enclosure and the ducting adapter, you should ignore them and bolt the adapter right onto the the enclosure.
The general idea for exhausting your fumes is Enclosure->Ducting->Fan->Ducting->Exhaust Port. The exhaust port should vent outside of the building. If you own, drill baby drill and attach a permanent pest-proof vent out of which you will vent the exhaust. Otherwise buy one of the window ones.
On the subject of fans, because these enclosures are so small, make sure you buy a fan speed controller specifically designed for inline fans unless you spec out the CFM properly. You need a proper one because running large inline fans below a certain speed threshold will damage them, but on the other side of the coin, an overpowered fan is a waste of electricity at best and a safety hazard at worst. And an underpowered fan is effectively useless.
My final note for now is that there is, in fact, a method to the madness of the design of the enclosures with no bottom. Any fan worth its salt will be airtight enough to use suction to hold your enclosure down on the tabletop even with its intake window(s) open. This is a good thing - a fully enclosed fibreglass box would not allow sufficient air movement to vent fumes.
There is so, so much more to it, but in terms of safety logistics, I think that's most of the important points.
Very good stuff. I didn't buy mine on Amazon for that exact reason (I don't like Amazon and I like dealing with the manufacturers directly) so our reasoning is opposite :) I don't trust Amazon reviews and I would not like dealing with Amazon in case of an issue with the machine. Manufacturers tend to have a support track for stuff they sell directly and they don't bother much with customers that bought through Amazon.
As for the enclosure, I'm going to do a whole separate section on enclosures this is more or less a placeholder, I'm still waiting on a sheet of 2C04 Acrylic to use as the window (the transparent piece in there right now is temporary). Good point about the glasses, the ones that come with the cutters usually royally suck.
While you're making recent comments, as a tangential aside, old mice with scroll wheels make semi decent X-Y position recorders for moving surfaces that the mouse guts+scroll wheel can be sprung against so the wheel rolls as the object moves.
You will have to hack some old mouse driver code to interface and determine which USB mouse input(s) are of interest.
It's a kludge that saved me time over a long three day weekend with no shops open years back when I was putting together a laser scanner project.
Eventually we had a proper stepper moter, for proof of concept it was an "uncontrolled" motor with a mouse scroll wheel counting clicks for rough "good enough" position feedback.
That's a hilarious hack, I have a whole crate full of old mice so definitely will have to try this. Worst case it will allow you to automatically e-stop the machine if it encounters an obstruction. For instance: sometimes the air assist will flip a piece up and the laser head during high speed traversal will run into it. That requires immediate manual intervention right now, it would be nice if that happened automatically.
It was an Aha! moment for me when I looked a crate with old mice - they have rolling wheels and click buttons with plenty of sample drivers for counting wheel turns, <onclick> <clickrelease> events, etc.
Ain't pretty - but it works until a better version comes along.
>I didn't buy mine on Amazon for that exact reason (I don't like Amazon and I like dealing with the manufacturers directly) so our reasoning is opposite
...For everything?
>Unless you know a dealer of the following products that you personally trust, buy on Amazon and sort by "Avg Customer Review"
The 'following products" were inline fans and goggles and enclosures. And I stand by that.
In terms of primary hardware I agree if you have a reliable manufacturer. I avoided saying "Buy a Falcon2 (22w minimum) from Creality because almost everything else is overpriced or shit" because I didn't want to ruffle feathers even though it's true.
Also I understand if you don't link or mention any of the (potentially critically important to your readers) information I provided you in your article because you ignored it all past the second line to virtue signal about Amazon, cheers comrade!
I'm not usually one to advocate buying things on Amazon, much less using filters, but in this particular case your eyesight is on the line. Unless you know a dealer of the following products that you personally trust, buy on Amazon and sort by "Avg Customer Review". And for the love of God, do your due diligence and take everything you hear about these things with a grain of salt.
First of all, the fireproof fibreglass enclosures generally work fine, but don't trust their tinted plastic windows to protect your eyes. The best practice with these things is to cultivate a habit of always, ALWAYS putting on your goggles before you ever enter the laser room.
If other adults have access to the room it's in, hang a couple pairs on the door with a warning sign to never enter without goggles. Make sure they know the rules.
Children should never, under any circumstance, enter a room containing a diode laser.
If your diode laser came with green goggles, those are almost certainly not good enough. Even if it was an expensive kit you bought. They're still the wrong ones. Look for ones with orange lenses that have video showing their lenses smoking/burning when the laser is pointed at them. And even then, make sure you have an enclosure with orange/brown tinted windows. Consider both proper goggles and the tinted window to be the absolute bare minimum in terms of eye safety.
If you bought a fibreglass enclosure and it came with a fan, it's probably too weak to do the job it needs to do. Get an inline fan that's marketed for growing weed. The diameter of the inlet and outlet ports should be smaller than that of the area within which the fan spins. The ones shaped like a can of beans almost certainly aren't going to be up to the job.
If your enclosure's design / instructions "require" the installation of a computer fan between the enclosure and the ducting adapter, you should ignore them and bolt the adapter right onto the the enclosure.
The general idea for exhausting your fumes is Enclosure->Ducting->Fan->Ducting->Exhaust Port. The exhaust port should vent outside of the building. If you own, drill baby drill and attach a permanent pest-proof vent out of which you will vent the exhaust. Otherwise buy one of the window ones.
On the subject of fans, because these enclosures are so small, make sure you buy a fan speed controller specifically designed for inline fans unless you spec out the CFM properly. You need a proper one because running large inline fans below a certain speed threshold will damage them, but on the other side of the coin, an overpowered fan is a waste of electricity at best and a safety hazard at worst. And an underpowered fan is effectively useless.
My final note for now is that there is, in fact, a method to the madness of the design of the enclosures with no bottom. Any fan worth its salt will be airtight enough to use suction to hold your enclosure down on the tabletop even with its intake window(s) open. This is a good thing - a fully enclosed fibreglass box would not allow sufficient air movement to vent fumes.
There is so, so much more to it, but in terms of safety logistics, I think that's most of the important points.