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| xTool F1 diode & fiber laser engraver $1,761.59 | on Amazon.com That's the total price paid + tax & free shipping via Prime |
I wanted an engraving laser that was compact & portable too, with good spectral resolution, good materials options, & high quality build & good product support & polished software. Taking all that together, the xTool F1 the better option & also less expensive.
QR code engraving cardboard the main idea, though being able to custom label my titanium cups, stainless steel things, leather belt, leather wallet, & many other person effects, or daily cary items, particularly my EDC personal protection, steel zippo, knife blades, badges, stickers, paint on my bicycle or bike. I can think of a lot of things I can engage with cool words from the Bible quoting Ephesians 4 or 5 my favorite parts of the Bible. I can think of putting info graphics & specs on things, labeling things, the possibilities are vast given the dual lasers ability to mark up many kinds of materials. Meg being an artists will be instrumental in some of the designs & applications. She is also probably going to be sorta upset that I spent nearly 2 grand on an engraving laser //
RBG IN EYE Laser Display Idea
Back in 1998 at NHS or Newport High School in South Bellevue, Washington, USA I was given the opportunity to design a product as part of a class project, so I selected a low energy 3 color interocular laser display module, essentials a prism held in front on one of your eyes like the lens of eye glasses, that shoots a low optical power full RGB laser projector image directly into the retina of the eye, producing a an in-visual field floating screen display without taking up much of your vision space. This was just a concept written up for the class, based on some futuristic VR technology I had tried earlier at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Wa, USA.
DIY Gas Laser Starting October 1994 *
1st Laser Output by February 1995 :
I am 40 years old as of 2024
Lasers were a long time hobby. When I was 11 years old, I started getting all the materials & equipment together & built a DIY CO2 laser. It cost me about $890 in direct parts cost, as some of the parts were donated, & I ended up spending over a year to make it using every DIY technique I had been learning for years from my late adoptive father Ken Schwarz.
The first time I turned it on, with cooling water flowing, mirrors aligned, HV supply on, trigger start circuit live, everything was a go to shoot about 40 watts of infrared light at 9.6 and 10.6 micrometers μm into the target. This went down hill quickly, more on that in bit.
I had the borosilicate tube made up & filled with a mixture of CO2, Nitrogen & Hydrogen at a neon sign shop in Seattle, who politely installed the machined aluminum water jacket cooling mirror holders made by a machine shop in Kent Washington.
I got the 15kv power supply from a theater supply house where an old man who had worked on gas lasers had a space CO2 laser power supply unit. I showed him the tube that I had been working on for 8 months & he was so impressed he gave me the power supply for free & wished me luck.
I also got help from Floyd at Laser Fantasy International in Redmond Wa, on the how to hook up the electronics, he even had me help him build a trigger starting circuit & safety lockout & emergency shut off switch assembly out of plastic sheets, cut with a hole saw on a power drilled, wired up with wires, low voltage DC from an AC wall wart, quick fab circuit boards, electronic parts, and he had me solder everything secure, glue the plastic panels together & setup the whole kit & test it.
It worked, the tube started glowing neon pink purple & the invisible beam set the wood 4inch square target on fire with the optical output hitting it from a few feet away. We had used a helium neon red laser from Milles Griot to align the crude home made CO2 laser tube setup.
It was build on an acrylic & aluminum sheet mounting setup, made from materials from tap plastics & metal supplier in Seattle. I literally spent over a year getting my dad to take me different places on Saturday to make this project happen.
Set the House On Fire
I was in the basement of my parents rental house in the early AM hours of a Saturday & wanted to fire up the DIY CO2 laser at home to see if I could get it to work on my own. I spent an hour or so after watching re-runs of Mister Wizard on TV while eating commercial cereal in milk in a white ceramic bowl, to make sure everything was safe, and secure.
I held down the safety start momentary switch, turned on the cooling aquarium pump hooked up with silicone tubing into a plastic tub with cold distilled water to the aluminum flow through tube mirror cooling brackets. Then I turned on the CO2 tube HV power supply and the tube lit up violet pink purple neon glow color & I was amazed that it was working, but looking at the target, there was nothing happening, but I smelled smoke.
What on earth, I looked the other way, oops, I had setup the tube backwards & not noticed since it was a very symmetrical design, newbie child design issue, and the output had set the door opposite of the target, the wood door to the basement on fire, which was now fully ablaze, which set the wood deck outside above the door on fire.
I was the only one awake, so I hit the emergency stop button & turned everything off, then ran outside to get the garden hose, turned the water on full at the spigot, ran back with the hose spraying water everywhere & started spraying water to extinguish the burning deck & door.
DIY Construction to Fix Damage
The fire damaged enough that I cost me $2438 out of pocket to get help & the materials to fix & rebuild everything, a new door, new trim, new deck boars, paint, nails, screws, and about 3 Saturday of me working mostly alone with my dad's help & his contractor friend stopping but to give me a few pointers and answer questions, he even gave me a printed copy of HOW TO Build a Deck from a local hardware store, so I could reference designs & methods during the construction.
Sold the Home Built CO2 Laser
My dad made me sell the CO2 kit laser & parts at a electronics swap meet a few weeks later, to an amazed older German man who was Jewish & had worked on IR heat seeking missile head electronics while working in aerospace before he retired. Wait, I knew this guy from middle school.
He was amazed that I build a working CO2 laser. I gave him a demo of it working with a few seconds the non visible IR optical power output started to burn a small wood target. He was so impressed he paid me $4321 cash for the system & told me to save the money, since I was going to need a lot more for my future electronics projects.
Heat Seeking Missile Technology
Dr. Lowenstein was his name, he was also the same guy who came to my middle School a few months earlier to tutor me about applied algebra when I was in the 6th grade. We hung out after school that one time & he showed me his patent placards on the wall of his home office & his wife made me a delicious NY deli style sandwich with the tastiest pickle I have ever eaten. They were super friendly.
For reason I don't understand, I never saw them again after that, but noticed they sold their home & heard that they had moved away to an adult care home. The ideas he gave me about analog circuits & heat phonons that one fateful day in 1995 left a lasting impression. I went on to become a scientist in college, several times over, & am essentially hyper educated & polymath today!
English Language Ambiguity Frustrates Me!
I remember my English teachers in School told me I would never become a good writer, since I really struggle with the ambiguity & inconsistencies in the English language. I struggled with reading & writing fiction as a student all the way through high school. I always like nonfiction more.
It was a brilliant lovely college teacher named Susan L. who was reading my long run on sentences about complex topic linked together, who asked me to come to her office hours to talk privately about my mind.
Later that week, in the evening, at her office hours, she said, look Aaron, your a genius, and the way you write also indicates that you are an autistic savant or have a very special unique mind, but the reason you struggle with English stems from all the illogical aspects of the English Language that do not align with your highly analytical thinking. I need you to count words in a sentence your writing, if there are more than 26 words, end with a period, & start a new sentence.
Other people who are not like you, and will likely not be able to make sense of what you are writing, or at least they will not understand what you are trying to communicate. You want people to understand what you are writing, so write in a way that other normal people can read it easily & make sense of. Like a simple food product made of a few ingredients that are easy to make sense of. Try to make you point in 30 seconds or less or your losing people, they can't follow you because they can't focus for hours & course like you. Aaron, you are a really special young man, and I know that I am a lot older, but if you were interested, I would love to go out with you.
That never happened, though she left a strong positive impression & encourage me to edit my writing more carefully! I actually focus on writing faster to produce content, then go do something else for a while, and come back to edit later. In this way I see more of the typos & corrections to edit efficiently. I am not sure why that works, but some actors told me thats how they memorize their lines. They read & try to recall the script lines for a hour or so, then go do something else for a little while, then come back & try again, and reiteratively study the lines on & off all day long, for weeks, to memorize the scripts for a movie. I had the good fortune of meeting a lot of A list actors down in California at parties held by a family friend.
Very Fortunate Lucky & Privileged Life
I am actually connected to a lot of wealthy influential & successful people, but always chose to do my own thing & go my own way. I have strong self teaching spirit & DIY focus & found MacGiver very inspirational as TV content personality when I was growing up.
My parents noticed that I was very sharp & really bored in school, so they gave me college text books from physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, science, & technology topics, & an entire printed copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica on a large wood book shelf assembly in the basement where I liked to hang out with the wolf spiders who were my friends.
Friendly Female Wolf Spiders
I loved their hairy legs & bodies & 8 eyes & they would sit on my hand & turn around look right at me as I talked to them. They would even crooked their heads back and forth almost like they understood or at least were tying to make sense of me, but when they turned around, I would put my hand down on the floor & let them go & they would casually walk off & run off to hide in the corner or something. They would come visit me when I was sitting on the couch reading the encyclopedias books for hours on end daily. Almost all of the spiders who came to see me were female too, oddly.
I really like spiders, they are the apex species in the insect kingdom, like humans are in the animal kingdom, so people have something in common with spiders. Early humans were also hunters like wolf spiders. Perhaps that was it, the spirit of the hunter that those girly wolf spiders and I had in common that created so many positive interactions, they never bit me, not once. I got a lot mosquito bites while hiking near upper alpine lakes as a Boy Scout on the other hand.
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