Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “First Look: Atomstack p9 diode laser engraver/cutter”.
Welcome back to the channel today we’re going to be looking at a diode laser. This is the atom stack p9. It’S a desktop laser cutter diode-based laser cutter. Now before i get into the specs on this machine and – and you know, show you how it works. Let’S just address the fact that this is a kickstarter uh campaign laser.
We had a lot of internal discussions that make you know about whether or not we were going to look at kickstarter stuff or not, because you know there’s a lot of risk involved and i think right now, what we’ve decided is we are going to show off Some kickstarter stuff, but with a big warning, this is going to be on kickstarter kickstarter is not like just buying a product. Some products succeed. Some products fail be sure to consider this. If you’re going to put money behind anything on kickstarter just be aware, it’s not a storefront, it’s a somewhat riskier proposition, but sometimes you get a better deal through it.
So do your own research about whether or not kickstarter is right for you now. Let’S talk about this laser, this laser is a diode laser. Now that means it’s a little bit different than a co2 laser or a fiber laser, there’s different kinds of lasers out there that can do different things. Typically, what we’ve seen what i’ve done on this channel before are co2 lasers? They have the big laser tube glass tube to create the laser and they’re.
Usually a large box, that’s fully enclosed. This is a diode laser, which means that all of the lasering is right. Here in this diode diode lasers are typically an open frame like this, and they typically, you know, are pretty identifiable because there aren’t, there isn’t a giant tube. There aren’t mirrors all over and there’s just a singular laser device out there. On the motion platform, there are pros and cons to diode lasers. Typically, the pros are they’re much cheaper than other lasers and they’re extremely portable.
The cons are they’re, typically much weaker. Now this specific one is a 10 watt laser. They call it dual compressed and i’m not really sure what that means.
When it comes to lasers compression i’ve heard used in a couple different ways. I suspect they’re talking about the focal point of the beam, is highly compressed, not the frequency of pulses of the beam. But you know what i’m not an expert, and so i’m just going to say they call it a dual compressed 10 watt laser now for comparison, a cheap k40 laser is usually a 40 watt advertised laser, so you’re, looking at a quite a difference in terms of Power, hey there.
This is caleb from the future or from the present. You see, i actually shot this video months ago and we planned on releasing it way before the kickstarter and now it there were some delays and then the kickstarter was delayed and we agreed to publish it after the kickstarter. So now there’s a bunch of answers to questions i had so i’m going to pop in occasionally and answer my own questions or elaborate on some points so that you have better information. Now. Remember these videos aren’t reviews. I don’t think it’s right to call something: a review when you’ve only used the product, a tiny bit um, so really i’m just showing off people’s products um.
So i can’t tell you how this works over the long term, but i can tell you a little bit more detail about some things. Let’S start with that dual compressed laser back, then i didn’t know what it was. I talked to them back and forth a bit. There were some major language barriers, not their fault, hey. They know more english than i know chinese, so they’re doing great. The point is, i didn’t know what they meant by a compressed laser.
You see in lasers that could mean a compression of the frequency that you’re firing the laser. It could mean a compression of the beam. They didn’t explicitly explicitly state it. But if you look at their kickstarter there is a diagram which shows what they mean is there are two lasers being compressed into one laser, i’m not really sure what the pros and cons here are. I think it’s a cheaper way to get more power out of your laser, but it seems to work. So that’s what dual compressed laser means some more features of this device.
It has this external screen for controlling it. I actually thought that was quite nice. You can turn it on. You can control it run, jobs and stuff, like that. A nice emergency switch here that you can slap. That’S nice as well.
The construction on the laser is simple, but nice. It took me maybe five minutes to assemble at most and then i was ready to start cutting. This machine also has an interesting safety feature, which means that if you’re running it and it tips – let’s say the table – it’s on, gets knocked over or it gets picked up somehow or something it will stop firing the laser. This is great. However, they didn’t ship. The laser with any safety glasses, so i’m using some from another laser that i have for testing. You will want to buy safety glasses for any laser, that you’re running one kind of pet peeve, or frustration that i have with these open frame. Lasers.
Not this laser specifically, but all of them of this design is that i see people using them in public, where you could have refractions and reflections from the laser hitting people’s eyes and doing damage. I would not recommend using these in public in that way, unless you’re going to build an enclosure around them made out of material that can filter that laser. My next point is the safety glasses. They talk about safety in their video a little bit.
They claim that there’s no need for safety, glasses, listen! I might be wrong. I might be over being over safe safety police. You know oversafe about it, but i believe you should wear protective eyewear around these lasers, even if they have a little shield here, because there can be reflections, i don’t think you should run them in public without an enclosure um. Maybe i’m i’m being overzealous about that. But that’s how i feel uh, based on the fact that i don’t want my eyes destroyed and you are shooting a powerful laser at things that could reflect it.
Wear safety, glasses folks, despite what the company says. So let’s talk about the capabilities, there’s a little bit of a language barrier here, the folks who made this were advertising that it could cut stainless steel and glass and after a lot of back and forth, we found out that was a bit of a translation issue And what they meant is that it could engrave stainless steel and glass or mark them, and that really had me very curious. So i wanted to try it out.
What i found was surprising to me at least i had always considered diode lasers as incapable or low powered uh compared to the other ones, and i did not know that you could mark stainless steel with them. They advertised being able to mark stainless steel. I tested it and what i found were some pretty mixed results. This is a money clip that was advertised as stainless steel and it marked beautifully i’ll show you an up close, but the design is messed up, because i did not secure it properly and it got bumped as the material warped from heat, but if it weren’t for My issues messing up this. It would have been a very nice engraving and i was really pleased with how that turned out. However, my next test was this little knife here from gerber, which says on the package that it’s a stainless steel handle.
It has some kind of a finish on it, though, that i don’t know if it’s just brushed or what, but it did not leave a mark on this handle at all. So your your results are going to be a bit hit and miss you’ll need to try out different materials to see if that will work all right. This is the big one metal engraving. They bring it up a few times in the kickstarter, their initial marketing email.
That they sent me said it could cut steel and that’s the entire reason i said yeah send me one. I want to see this with my own eyes turns out that again was a communication issue between the company that made it the company that was promoting it and me, and again, i’m not going to criticize them for for translation issues they’re trying their best. They are learning a second language and i’m not so i you know, i don’t want to criticize them, but it is frustrating to have miscommunications. They cannot cut metal uh. They ultimately came back to me and apologized and said: oh no, no, i can’t cut metal, but it can engrave some metal and you can you can see in this article. I tried a bunch of different things, so let me explicitly state it can absolutely mark some stainless steel. I don’t know what they mean by aluminum oxide.
Unfortunately, it did not leave any marks on any aluminum i had, but maybe they mean, if you have a powder coating or something on it, it will burn that off uh, which is totally viable. But despite that, i think this is actually you know a decent implementation of a diode laser and again i was super surprised to find that it could mark stainless steel at all. The key takeaway is get what you’re wanting to mark and try it first don’t count on it, don’t buy a bunch because, as you can see, some things mark and some things don’t, and i think that really comes down to the type of steel it is and Most people don’t actually explicitly explain exactly what you know, mixture and hardness, and all that they’re selling you so trial and error.
I tried a few different other materials on this, such as brass. It was interesting with brass it. It left. If, if you get close enough, i don’t know if i’ll be able to capture this on camera.
If you look at it at the right angle, you can see the surface is a little bit shinier where the laser hit it. I think that’s just a coating. That’S on this brass that maybe got burnt away, but i would say you probably wouldn’t use it on brass. I tried it on aluminum and it did absolutely nothing as you would expect.
So you know basically you’re going to have to do a lot of trial and error with these to get what you want out of them, but if you’re working with plastics woods leathers, you know stuff like that, you can count on them. Working decently fine check out the electronics page in the maker shed and get your favorite maker, a kit or two. We have micro bit raspberry, pi, arduino and all kinds of other cool kits gadgets and tools, there’s something for all skill levels and if you get over 75 and you’re in the us, there’s free shipping too check it out at makershed.com, oh and be sure to subscribe.
To the newsletter and get weekly deals, i was able to run this laser to engrave wood, no problem. I was able to get fantastic results, it’s also capable of cutting materials. Uh, it cut this little card. Here i cut a circle on a square. It cut perfectly fine, it took three passes to do this beautiful cut, though i could have increased the power to do it in one pass, but it would have more of a scorched edge. I wanted to see how pretty of a cut i could get.
So i did three passes at a lower strength and i have to say i’m impressed with how pretty of a cut this actually did. I think in general, with diode lasers, you just need to weigh the the pros and cons. You know the trade-offs um they’re, cheaper, they’re, easier to move but they’re weaker you’re. You know your co2. Laser is going to be more suited to cutting thicker materials faster um, but, as these little diode lasers seem to be doing the job, just fine for some basic cutting and engraving all right.
I’Ve deleted the whole part that told you about where to go, find their information because it was out of date, their kickstarter is live now the kickstarter link is down below as usual. You know: beware, it’s a kickstarter, not a store, but it looks. Like i mean adam stack has had kickstarters before they’ve shipped printers uh, who knows it, looks like it’ll go through and they set their goal really low like four thousand dollars. So you know it’ll be um, you know a successful kickstarter in terms of reaching their goal, so there will be a link to the kickstarter down below the price range is like 400 to 600. I think, if i recall correctly – let’s say let’s say: 500 – we’ll cut the difference and say 500., as i said earlier, that plants this firmly in the same price bracket as a k40 co2 laser. But with a k40 you have additional upgrades. You really need to do to make it work well and they’re, not necessarily the most reliable things, there’s some fragility issues with the glass tube, there’s major pros and cons on either side uh. So i don’t want to say that, as like you know, just go.
Get a k40 or something like that. I think this could be more reliable but slower and weaker. So it’s all a trade-off anyway. Make your own decisions check out their kickstarter below and we’ll see you on the next article thanks for joining us.
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