Xtool F2 Ultra¶
Scoring red coca cola can:
- Power 100%
- Speed 4
- Other settings at default values
These settings will just cut the aluminium in a red Coca Cola can. Sometimes they'll leave the piece in place so you'll have to gently pry it out.
PCB Engraving¶
Use raster image. Back pixels will be engraved. It should look like the image below.
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Select the image and use the settings below.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Laser Type | MOPA IR |
| Dot Duration | 100 |
| Power | 1-100 |
| Pass | 3 |
| DPI | 500 |
| Bitmap mode | Grayscale |
| Frequency | 65 |
| Pulse width | 200 |
| Engraving mode | Bi-directional |
You can do a cleanup pass by adding a black mask rectangle all over the whole area of the PCB. Select it and use the settings below.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Power | 50% |
| Speed to | 10 000 |
| Pass | 4 |
Up next: solder stencils from soda cans!
It seems that, as the job progresses, the beam will cut more easily. It might be because the material is heating up.
Unrolling, then working it flat and attacking from the silver side:
- Power 100%
- Speed 10mm/s
Galvanized steel engraving¶
- 100%
- 8200 mm/s
- 10 passes
Stone engraving¶
Unsuccesful. The stone is composed of two minerals and they are affected differently, so what you see is the stone composition rather than the image.
Update: later attemps worked better using the blue laser! A light pass is required. If you overkill, the light marks in the stone turn dark and the contrast will be much worse.
Black acrylic¶
Very nice. 1.6mm thick, cut at - Power 100% - Speed 10mm/s
Color engraving in stainless steel¶
We tried coloring an inox table knife. The process works but it is very sensitive. Same settings on different size patches or different thickness material resulted in slightly different colors.
We took the starting parameters from this page
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Laser | Blue |
| Power | 70% to 100% |
| Speed | 150 to 450 mm/s |
| Pass | 1 |
Aluminium Engraving (in FrameWork LapTop)¶
We tried to engrave a part of my framework laptop. We supposed that the part is a type of aluminium. We started with some test patches on the underside.
Than I made a design for the front. We first did some smaller test.
| Parameter | Final Value |
|---|---|
| Laser | MOPA IR |
| Power | 60 % |
| Speed | 1500 mm/s |
| lines/cm | 180 |
| Pass | 1 |
Engraving in Copper Sticker¶
First we did some test patches to find the right parameters. Issues is that when it is too powerful the paper catches on fire while the copper is still in one piece.
The answer wa to use less power and more passes.
| Parameter | Final Value |
|---|---|
| Laser | MOPA IR |
| Power | 100 % |
| Speed | 500 mm/s |
| lines/cm | 100 |
| Pass | 4 |
For the design I took a Totoro and converted it with bitmap in inkscape and added a square contour to cut it out. And finally stock it on my laptop.
Engraving and cutting carbon steel¶
Engraving¶
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Laser | MOPA |
| Power | 30% |
| DPI | 1000 |
| Dot Duration | 200 us |
| Pass | 1 |
Cutting¶
Embossing, first try¶
Little trick: emboss a 1mm thick line around your intended cut. You can make it by offsetting + making compound vector.
The process is not clean, and the piece will come out with ragged edges and rusty.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Laser | MOPA |
| Power | 100% |
| Speed | 40mm/s |
| Pass | 6-10 for .5mm steel |
| Pulse duration | 500ns |
| Dwell time | .1s |
Tried some PCB patterns to engraving¶
(by Yosuke Tsuchiya)
Sampo-system PCB
6 accelerator pcb
RP2040 minimal dev board
(minimal design example in Hardware design guide)
KiCAD file could be downloaded from here
A couple of t3226 board (for practicing Reflow)
.xcs files¶
Find in this compressed file the XTool Studio project files for most of these experiments, with embedded settings and paths.
.xcs is a proprietary format, but in fact it is plain text json, so it should be easy to read even if you don't have access to Xtool Studio.
Bitmap images and SVG paths are embedded, so file sizes can get out of hand.