Recently, I participated in Maker Faire Singapore 2017 showcasing this laser engraver that I worked on with 4 of my friends! It is made based on the red laser diode, precision stepper motor and gears all found in 2 DVD drives. Together with an arduino, an open-source software known as GRBL and GRBL-controller, we made this over around 7 days.

(The GIF is sped up to around 16x)

Below are some of the things we engraved. We gave out quite a few of these to interested visitors to the fair! These were the few that were left. It takes 10-20 minutes to burn one of these.

The laser engraver consists of the stepper motor frames, that convert the precision rotational motion of the stepper motors into a precision translational motion. The base holds the piece of cork and moves in the x-axis, while the ceiling holds the laser housing and moves in the y-axis. A stepper motor driver - the EasyDriver - sends times pulses to control the positions. The stepper motor is in turn controlled by the Arduino with GRBL loaded on it. GRBL is a software that parses G-code and converts it into well-timed movements so that the steppers move to the correct position for the correct amount of time. Finally, the computer is connected via USB to the Arduino and the GRBL-controller software send serial input into the Arduino.

Below is a screenshot of the GUI interface of GRBL-controller.

The laser diode is run by a constant current circuit, and the light is focused by a small lens embedded in the laser housing. This is the setup before we neatened it:

And after we neatened it and placed it all into a box:

Here are the open source software we used:

https://github.com/gnea/grbl

http://zapmaker.org/projects/grbl-controller-3-0/

Thanks! Feel free to ask any questions about it!