Steve's Paper Wave and Laser Page

Somewhere around 2004, I thought it would be fun to get a laser so that I could cut some precise scrap...like this: I started by buying the cheapest 40watt laser cutter I could find. I had been making perl scripts that would produce DXF files. According to the manufacturer, the cutter's sofware could read DXF. Long story short, although it could read the files, it would not cut them. I decided to make my own. I pulled the laser tube and power supply out of the cutter. Then, I found an XY plotter on ebay that had no bids. It was mine for $1 plus shipping. Once the plotter arrived, I gutted the motors and driving boards. About 2.5 days later, I had a working laser cutter. Like most plotters of it's day, it reads HPGL in the form of PLT files... So, I converted my scripts to generate PLT files. This was all well and good, but my CAD program was not able to read the PLT files which meant I had no easy way to view the PLT files prior to cutting. Back to the computer I went and soon I had a working PLT viewer in full perl/Tk glory. Here are a couple of screen shots of the PLT viewer showing the 11" by 18" area of the cutter: The laser is currently in a non working state... I still have all the parts, but debating whether to ever reassemble... Too many projects, too little time