121–130 of 200 posts
A society in which "the average car-buyer" has a tiny portable steel-melting laser is a society where I'm wearing welding goggles every time I leave the house. And I'm not sure how you even lock a bike or a door or a safe any more.
My bike is protected by Anti-Theft Aesthetics (tm).
This article on society 5.0 doesn't mention lasers. Anyone have info on why ultra-powerful lasers are critical to specifically this plan for the future? https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/society5_0/index.html
If you look at the document linked at the bottom of the page you shared: https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/kihonkeikaku/5basicplan_en.pdf it mentions the following list of priorities for the plan, and with a bit of creativity it is possible to imagine ways how cheap, powerful, compact lasers could benefit each of them in turn. Probably, and more mundanely, the researchers are doing their best to justify their research gran…
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30W? That's a pretty powerful laser. A 1W laser can set stuff on fire. A 5W laser can cut steel.
> A 5W laser can cut steel I've experimented with using a 60 W (I think*) laser on a small steel bracket, and even with the beam holding on a single point for a minute, it made a barely visible dot that you couldn't feel by running your finger over. * It was nearly a decade ago, but I looked up the relevant hacker space and unless they changed the model, it was 60 watts. The bracket was around 1cm by 5cm, and around…
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The precision of a laser cutter would open up a lot of possibilities. Particularly making things that slot together with tabs - like fabbing my own welding squares and fixtures where a cnc plasma cutter would leave too rough an edge to have them slot together accurately.
Can't you buy a CNC mill/router that can cut metal more precisely than a CNC plasma cutter?
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There are already so many ways to defeat locks, that locks are just there to keep honest people honest and to slow down criminals. The laser in the article took 30 seconds to cut a a tiny disc out of a sheet of steel 100 micrometers thick. That isn’t going to change things on the theft front. There are much more effective methods available today.
The battery powered angle grinder was the end of useful bike locks AFAIK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpVOTEOMRuE
https://www.amazon.com/Kryptonite-Evolution-Integrated-Chain...
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There are already so many ways to defeat locks, that locks are just there to keep honest people honest and to slow down criminals. The laser in the article took 30 seconds to cut a a tiny disc out of a sheet of steel 100 micrometers thick. That isn’t going to change things on the theft front. There are much more effective methods available today.
> There are already so many ways to defeat locks, that locks are just there to keep honest people honest and to slow down criminals. If you live at a lower end apartment complex, you might be shocked at how many doors your key will unlock, if you apply a light turning pressure and thrust the key in and out a few times. I know I was. But it came in handy when one of my xmas gifts had been delivered to the front office…
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The battery powered angle grinder was the end of useful bike locks AFAIK.
There are bike locks that do mostly defeat angle grinders. They are not cheap, of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpVOTEOMRuE https://www.amazon.com/Kryptonite-Evolution-Integrated-Chain...
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Have you not heard of stray bullets, crossfire etc?
BB gun — that's as in "ball bearing" — also known as "airsoft". In this example, crossfire would require someone to walk into an airsoft combat area without any eye protection and for someone in that game to not realise and shoot them anyway. In the face. Stray BB bullets don't go very far. They're not rifled, and they have fairly low muzzle energy compared to real weapons — I've shot myself with one at zero range, a…
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Can't you buy a CNC mill/router that can cut metal more precisely than a CNC plasma cutter?
Not cheaply, which was part of the OP's post.
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CNC would be an obvious implementation. At the moment, there are expensive-but-affordable home CNC laser cutters, typically for a small number of thousand EUR/USD. The more powerful ones can do a very neat job cutting (up to a few mm of) plywood. There are also CNC plasma cutters, which do a good but slightly rough job of cutting sheet metal, and are relatuvely large and complex beasts. I guess a highly-powerful lase…
Yeah, my larger point is that there are already plenty of ways to cut metal in a home workshop. I don't see how a laser would be an improvement on any of those, unless the goal is to CNC with extremely tight tolerances, but even then... it seems unlikely that you'll be CNCing blocks of metal, more likely just 2D cuts from sheets of metal, which is pretty limiting. It would certainly be fun for some stuff, but I think…
I love the idea of using a mill/router instead, but IMO the more complicated process is fundamentally more dangerous. If a reflected beam can conceivably pierce the enclosure though, hmmm...