Hi I am joe
I have been embedding electronics into my laser cut apartment blocks that I have been making with year 8
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Gday, Iām Paul. Live in Sydney work as a Theme Ride Plumber. Long story, lol.
Iām building a 1:1 R2D2 and Iām up to the electronics stage which is the one thing I know nothing about so it will be an interesting ride for me.
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I bought a 3020 mill from ebay. But then had to redo all the electronics (originally ran from a LTP port), I bought a new spindle 200w 12000rpm brushless. Itās been a fun project upgrading it, but the upgrades did cost more than the original mill itself. I feel like a good choice now is something like the shapeoko or xcarve.
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MDF 3mm works flawlessly, and itās very very cheap. Means making design mistakes doesnāt hurt financially. Acrylic 3mm also works perfectly.
6mm MDF sits outside the lasers focal point just a tad too much. (changing the lens in the cutting head would fix this). It does work, but the resulting cut isnāt quite as clean as on 3mm.
Iāve only had it for a week now, so Iām still trying stuff out. CO2 lasers canāt cut any form of metal, but they can engrave anodized aluminum and you can get a marking fluid to enable engraving of steel.
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Hi iām Will
Iāve been working on electronics for a while now. Iāve helped a start up with their 3D printer http://auroralabs3d.com/ and iām currently working on 2 projects.
First project is for a mate. Itās a sun simulating light array that increases itās brightness over 15 minutes to help wake up in the morning. We have got some good progress iām planning on hacking into an old digital alarm clock to intercept the buzzer alarm voltage to trigger the lamp warm up. The idea behind it all is to keep it as low cost as possible. Here is a similar but expensive example http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/09/16/sunrise-lamp-alarm-clock/
Second project involves attaching a laser range finder on my drone to measure out distances. You can control the range finder with pan/tilt servos from the first person camera view. Itās in itās early stages but after iāve proved a few concepts iām looking to integrate it with the lidar litev2. Worst case senario iāll have a very accurate altitude messuring tool.
Cheers,
Will
Very clean looking castings there. Great job.
I am now very jealous of your R2 Unit. I only got as far as making the head and then ran out of free time.
Yeah well it is chinese 50Wā¦which means 40W RMS and probably 50W peak really haha!
Itās quite good tho, have had no issues really with it at all, software and interface is really good (was expecting bad from chinese laser) and I have cut and engraved heaps with it.
As for material I usually cut 3/6mm MDF/acrylic at about 4mm/s and 7mm ply at ~2mm/s, once I get around to it I will upgrade the laser around the 120W mark as there are tubes on eBay and that was always the plan, I got this one for the larger build space and better interface than the smaller one on eBay 
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Thatās awesome, that could be pretty handy. Now to decide if I should pony up and splash $600 on one.
Thanks for the info on the CNC mill as well.
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Hi Iām Ross from Melbourne. Iām interested in astrophotography and am about to embark on a new project using an Arduino and a stepper motor to control the focus of a remote control camera on my telescope. Still a lot to learn about my Arduino so this should be a good learning experience as well as a useful project.
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Iām Mike Ando, from Brisbane and active member of Hackerspace Brisbane. Thereās a running joke among my friends that Iām a time-travelling mad scientist, because thatās what they called me when I was on Beauty & the Geek Australia a few years ago and because these days itās more true than false. I drive a DeLorean, used to own my own satellite before it re-entered the atmosphere, collect radioactive isotopes, and I knit.
My personal favourite project I made is a replica Myst linking book from the video game Myst that I made a few years ago, which the creators liked so much it was scanned for use instead of the original in their HD 3D remake of the game, realMyst Masterpiece Edition.
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Hi, Iām Robyn and from Adelaide Hackerspace. This year Iāve been working on a Mind Controlled Arduino Robot and a 3d Printer.
Why did you choose to use the Galileo?
Cheers,
Marcus
Maddy Here!
Also known as āMega Overlordā - Best thing about owning your own businessā¦you get to choose your job title.
I do logisticsā¦shippingā¦bit of email answeringā¦accounts and other random stuff. Over the last 7 years Iāve enjoyed building this business and look forward to many more happy years of tinkering and shipping
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Hi Iām Josh, a freelance industrial designer in Sydney.
Iāve made an arduino based dc motor controller to perform lifecycle testing on an industrial turntable subassembly.
My latest project involves 6DOF IMUs and more dc motors. I have a DLP resin 3d printer.
Marcus,
Excellent question! Iām not really sure to be frank, but I kind of like the fact that I can do system calls (system(");, even though my linux knowledge is a disaster.
Pros:
Means I can run python scripts and other linux commands.
PCIE on board for Wifi.
POE Ethernet
On board SD
Uno Campatible shields ( I use a lot of Grove hardware)
Cons:
In hindsight, a better choice would probably be a Uno R3.
Would have been easier to make my Adafruit 2.8" touch screen work, though I now have cool libraries that give faster performance than i had initially.
GPIO performance suits my purposes, but probably not for other projects.
BIG CON- very little documentation, forum support for Galileo.
I take advice - what do you think about the Galileo, anyone?
Anthony
What type of light bucket do you have? (see how I drop the lingo in there)
Hi all, Iām Head of Science at a girls school here in Sydney. Iām also running the STEAM movement we have to try and promote girls enjoyment/engagement/confidence in STEAM subjects.
I have set up a Makerspace that is insanely popular with our yr 7-8 girls which is very exciting. I just taught them how to use the Sparkfun Red Boards and we have a awesome parent who has volunteered to come in to teach the girls some things with Raspberry Pi!
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I have a Vixen VC200L and a 200mm F5 Newt.
Got the lingo! 
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Wet and wild theme park?