In this chapter of the Zero to Maker workshop, we're diving into laser cutting, how it works, when you should use it, and we'll get a couple of parts laser cut. If you're new to this workshop, Jaryd and myself will be taking you on a fast-paced and practical journey to learn a wide variety of maker skills, so that you have the tools and knowledge to make anything. Follow along as we develop our own projects and share insights into the process. I'll walk you through making this stencil tool, with measurements on the side, some common shapes you might use in drawings, and we'll even add a logo. We'll learn how to use all of the common tools for laser cutting in Illustrator.

A laser cutter uses a moving rail system much like a 3D printer. Instead of a hot nozzle depositing plastic, it uses a high-power beam of light and a jet of air to melt and burn away material. This process is quite similar to 3D printing, but this time we need a 2D vector file. This is equivalent to a model for 3D printing. We create this 2D file using a vector editing program like Inkscape or Illustrator, but we can also use one of the faces or sketches from our CAD model. Then we convert these lines into instructions for the laser cutter, and we can tell it to either cut along these lines or engrave an area. A cut goes all the way through the material, and an engrave only removes the very top of it. Laser cutting is great at making thin, flat parts out of clear or coloured acrylic, plywood or MDF with great dimensional accuracy. But its strengths are also its weaknesses. We can only cut parts in 2D, so if you need a part with 3D features, it is often better to use a 3D printer. Another thing to keep in mind is that laser cutters are precise, but they can't cut thick material. If you want to make a part out of thicker plywood or metal, it might be better to make them on a CNC mill. We'll have a video on using CNC mills later.

We can't cut anything too thick or make anything in 3D, but when we can make parts with a laser cutter, it will be so much faster than using a 3D printer or CNC. Now we know the strengths and weaknesses, so let's check out some examples where we've used laser cutting. I've just walked around the office and grabbed some projects that used the laser. This simple platform mounts breakout boards with standoffs by cutting some small holes and it took about 2 minutes on the laser cutter, where a 3D printer would have taken about 2 hours. By stacking several layers of acrylic together, we can reclaim that lost dimension and protect this pie, and allow for some airflow, enough room to mount a heatsink, and leave access for all of the ports. This weather station combines 3D printing and laser cutting to make this sweet enclosure. A very simple way to integrate transparent materials with 3D-printed parts. This cardboard tunnel was cut out of a flat bit of cardboard and folded into 3D with perfectly placed perforations. Our Fab Academy assignment was to make a press fit kit. I made this customisable building system out of 3mm thick plywood. Everything is held together with slots and joins, with a tight precise fit. Jared made this molecule diorama with different colours of acrylic and another press fit joint. Links to all of these examples or a similar project in the article. I'm sure you've got some ideas for laser cutting now, so how do you get access to one? Not everyone will have one at home. There are Fablabs and Makerspaces all around us, and Google is great at finding them. These kind of spaces foster a great community, so go check them out. Chances are they have some cool tools like a laser cutter.

To make our files, we need a vector editing program. I'll be using Illustrator since that's what I'm familiar with, but Inkscape is a free alternative and has all of the features you need to make your own laser-cutting projects. Here we are in the home screen of Illustrator. Let's create a new file, select the units to be millimetres. This is a unit we can find on a ruler. The stencil tool will fit in our pocket, and we'll design it to be about 50x100mm. Let's make our artboard or drawing space a little bit bigger at 70x150mm. And now let's check that we're in RGB colour mode. And create! Let's get started by clicking the rectangle tool. Before we draw anything, set our stroke to 0.01, and make sure it's centre aligned. The colour should be full red, 0 green, and 0 blue. In hex RGB colour, this is FF0000. Create the body of the stencil. Let's make it 50mm wide by 100mm tall, then align it to the centre of the document. And drag it down so we can add a round on the top later. To add the round, let's select the ellipse tool, and while we hold the alt and shift key, we can create a perfect round circle that's centred in the rectangle. And that'll be 50x50mm, exactly what the rectangle was wide. Let's combine these using the shape builder. Select both the rectangle and the circle, and draw between the edges we want to join. We haven't changed any of the stroke settings, so these should remain unchanged. Now let's add measurement increments to the left side. Start by making a 5mm horizontal line, and aligning it to the bottom edge. And let's lock the red outline, since I accidentally keep selecting it. To get all of our measurement lines, we can use the transform tool. This is the best patterning tool, and that's similar to the ones we've used in CAD. We need an additional 9 copies at 1mm increments vertically. So we'll put a negative out the front. We can separate them by clicking object, then expand appearance, and ungroup them. Now they're free little strokes all on their own. And we want the millimetre markers to be half the length, so let's change the width to 2.5mm, and align them to the left edge. We have the resolution on the laser cutter, so let's make round edges on each of the lines. And to make a 10cm rule or ruler, we can transform up by 10 times, so we get the longest centimetre marker at the end. Then we'll expand the appearance, ungroup, and delete all of the smaller ones at the top. Then let's add some numbers like all rulers. Let's find a nice readable font, and we'll copy it upwards again, and change their numbers to the measurements. To properly align them, we need to convert each to a shape. So we'll right click, ungroup, and expand appearance again to convert them to a vector. And finally, align them. Very cool! Let's start by adding a larger circle. Click on the ellipse tool again, and make a 30mm circle, centre aligned around the top round. Oh no, I forgot to change the fill on each shape. We can fix this later, but we should have some notes here. Oh, looks like we've hit a bit of the text there, but no worries.

To shrink all of the numbers, let's go to object, then transform each, and scale each of them down a bit, and we'll scoot them across to the left. With the circle selected, we can duplicate them down by holding alt and dragging. Belink the proportions and set the reference point to the top edge in the middle, then scale it down to 20mm, and add 5 to Y to move it down a bit, and we'll do the same again for a smaller circle. We might want to draw some rounded corners, so let's add one. Using the direct selection tool, click on the bare corner, and make it a 5mm round. We also could select an inverted round, or a chamfer. This has made a nice place to add a rounded logo, like the Core Electronics one. We have an SVG file prepared, but this will also work with other types of vector files. Let's place and scale it down, then move it into the corner, and translate it in X and Y by minusing 5 in each direction. Our design's looking great so far. We have a couple of etches, and if these are on the top face, they can get contaminated really easily. Generally etches on the bottom side will remain cleaner for much longer.

We could wait until our design is complete and mirror all of it, but we'll get ahead of that and do it now. The text and logo will look backwards if they aren't mirrored, and coincidentally, this will put our ruler on the right-hand side. But this can be mirrored easily for left handed makers. Let's add some more shapes. We'll start with the square. It's used the stroke and fill settings from the text and logo. Let's change it back to the red outline and clear the fill. Now let's align it with all of our other shapes. And we'll also add a triangle, making the bottom edge the same as the square. We're missing some shapes to draw sharper edges with a pen. We'll use the line tool to draw some longer lines in pairs. I'm going to increase the stroke width here, just so that we can get a pencil or pen inside of these lines. And obviously this is a no-no to cut, but we can get the outline in a second. To join them, we need some tools exclusively in stroke options. We'll snap these lines to 45 and 30-degrees, and then we'll align the ends, right-click them to join, and we'll clean them up by adding some round caps and round inside corners. To get the outlines, we can click object, then expand. Now we'll convert it to an outline without a fill, ready for cutting. We'll move all of this inside of our tool. And the possibilities don't end here. You can use the shape tool to draw different shapes like a hexagon, add some more text around the tool like your name, or rotate the text on the ruler horizontally. Now let's save it and head to the laser cutter.

And here we are down in the factory. We're going to be taking a look at the laser cutter now, and getting our files all the way through to a finished product. Let's get into it. First we're going to take our piece of material and load it onto the bed here. We're going to be putting this bit of material in the back corner. Now I'm going to close the machine and turn it on. Over here on the control panel to the right of the laser, we have the start key, E stop, and all of the controls for the laser cutter. Let's turn it on. Just power it up, and now the bed will lower. The laser has lowered and completed its home sequence. Using the control panel, we can hold shift and up to bring the bed back to the top. Now we'll slowly come back up. The laser head's back at the top, our material's in, let's open the enclosure. Let's move the laser head over to where we want it. Now down, using the arrow keys here. Now we'll just grab the focusing tool and put it on this side shelf just there. We'll bring the bed up until it gets knocked off. Now that's done, we know that the laser's focused. Over here on the PC, we have the file that we want to laser cut. Just before we do that, let's make sure that our document adheres to all of the rules we had a look at before. This line is 0.01, along with all of these here. The stroke is FF0000 in RGB hex, and that fill here is coming through as a question mark. Let's change the fill to none, so that there aren't any conflicts. Now we can file, print, I want to send to the Trotec engraver. This will take a second to load, and we can click on setup here to make sure that we have the correct profile. I'm going to click on preferences, we have the CoreELEC services 3 mil. You'll have a range of profiles available for different materials, thicknesses and settings on your laser cutter. Ask the maker space coordinator or whoever runs the laser cutter for which profile you should use. We're using services acrylic 3 mil, since that's the material that we're using. Store those settings and print. It'll take a second to load, and then JobControl will open, the software that we use to send jobs to the laser cutter. Here in JobControl, our file's just loaded in. Let's double-click on the tracing stencil tool to put it on the laser bed. We can visualize our file by clicking on the lines here, and we can see an approximation of those. That's not very right, so let's update those. So we've got about 3 minutes of etching and 40 seconds of laser cutting. That seems about right, and our job looks perfect. Let's connect to the laser cutter, and we can see that we have the tool head here being mirrored across to the machine. This vertical orientation isn't very good for laser cutting, as engraving will sweep across horizontally. So we'll rotate the job, and then unselect the view tool, and click rotate. And then we want this top left-hand corner to snap to the crosshair where the print head is. So let's click play. It'll re-home, that's fine, the filter will start up, it's compiling our job, and it will send it to the laser cutter to begin etching. So that internal geometries don't fall out of a bit of material, it will do etches, followed by internal holes, and then outer holes. The laser's just finished cutting our job, so let's open it up. We'll head over to the control panel, and the filter's just finished running, so we'll turn off the laser cutter to make sure it doesn't move. Open up the enclosure, and let's remove our parts. Take away the main part, and here we've got the job. Put that off to the side. Make sure you grab any other little parts. Here we have it, there's a few little bits being held in, we can just push those out. Great, that's our finished bit, now we just need to take the paper off.

Sweet, we're back in the studio and we've got our laser cut part. So how does it fare? Let's take off the paper and give it a go. Designing in 2D is amazing for laser cutting projects, but say we want to make a window like in the weather station example from before. In our CAD of choice we can export a DXF, another vector file format that we can load into Illustrator or Inkscape. In Onshape we can select the face, then right click and export as DXF. In Fusion 360 we can create a new sketch, then create, project the face, and if we right click the sketch from browser, we can export as DXF. From there, load into your vector editing program, and go laser cut the parts.

We've learnt so much about laser cutting today. What it is, how we can use it for our projects, and we even walked through the full design and laser cutting process along with how to export from CAD. Check out all of our other videos in this series where we go in depth on key maker skills. Thanks for watching.