31–40 of 65 posts
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Yeah definitely, I can't help but think the power source needed would be very heavy too.
Who makes you unable to help yourself? Say, one watt delivered onto the retina can do damage very quickly. One AA battery can easily supply that.
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Yeah, I don't really see the issue. People play with knives, operate firearms, use table saws, and cross the street in traffic all the time. The stakes are high in life, and if you're not careful you might poke an eye out with that thing, but what fun is a world where everything is engineered to be too dull to poke an eye out?
Because it's extremely easy to damage other people with lasers. Stray reflections can easily blind. It's one thing if you're in an enclosed space only able to hurt yourself, but most of the real world is not like that.
[0] Which to me has always been one of those "hard to believe things" and, indeed, I've never worked with an IR laser or tested this (nor would I be interested in doing so) but I can't think of something more terrifying (related to blindness, anyway) than walking into a room, looking at something, seeing nothing particularly interesting and then ... seeing nothing at all ever again.
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> we may see a viable laser rifle soon We won't. It's been a while since I compared the muzzle energy of a rifle bullet and that of a relatively powerful laser, and I don't have the time to dig up the comparison again right now, but the tl;dr: is that we won't see an even theoretically man-portable laser that can put a hole through someone for a very long time, if ever. Setting things on fire and damaging light senso…
A rifle has a muzzle energy of a couple kilojoules. So you're looking at lasers in the kW power range. I doubt that you could do comparable damage even if you could deliver comparable energy. Flesh doesn't conduct heat terribly well and vaporizing a centimeter of skin is not very lethal.
edit: if it's not obvious this is a joke
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If I absolutely had to pick, and the choice was between 1) get shot and maybe survive; or 2) 100% chance of getting blinded - I'd pick the first one.
Why are you comparing a weapon that has to hit a whole person and misses to a weapon that has to hit a 5mm retina and somehow never misses?
A decent hardware hacker could build an area-denial laser turret in a long weekend with a couple of hundred bucks of parts. I hope to god that nobody ever does.
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Yeah, I don't really see the issue. People play with knives, operate firearms, use table saws, and cross the street in traffic all the time. The stakes are high in life, and if you're not careful you might poke an eye out with that thing, but what fun is a world where everything is engineered to be too dull to poke an eye out?
Because it's extremely easy to damage other people with lasers. Stray reflections can easily blind. It's one thing if you're in an enclosed space only able to hurt yourself, but most of the real world is not like that.
To emphasize this point, since we're talking about a 450nm laser at either 500mW (maybe just barely low enough to hypothetically qualify as Class 3B?) or 800mW (probably Class 4?), any stray reflections could easily cause blindness before the eye can respond by blinking.
Any laser powerful enough to burn or cut is a "why did my eye make a popping sound"[1], risk, not the "blink oww! that's bright!" that we are familiar with.
[1] the sound is a spot on the retina explosive boiling after the laser heated it extremely rapidly past 100C
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Yeah, I don't really see the issue. People play with knives, operate firearms, use table saws, and cross the street in traffic all the time. The stakes are high in life, and if you're not careful you might poke an eye out with that thing, but what fun is a world where everything is engineered to be too dull to poke an eye out?
Because the selling point is public use: its not just dangerous for the operator, but goes out of its way to invite bystanders.
And what about the bit where he says that it's "the wild west" (mythicized time when, in actuality, homicide rates were not really that high, especially for the time) or "mad max" (completely fictional Australian motor fantasy).
The things that actually prevent laser related injuries from being a common health problem are a) common knowledge about laser safety (usually explained thoroughly by manufacturers), and b) the relative obscurity and lack of particular interest in high powered laser devices.
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Who makes you unable to help yourself? Say, one watt delivered onto the retina can do damage very quickly. One AA battery can easily supply that.
Sorry I wasn't thinking about a system capable of blinding people, those do definitely exist though. Also there are devices such as 'dazzlers' which are intended to cause non-permanent damage.
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Because it's extremely easy to damage other people with lasers. Stray reflections can easily blind. It's one thing if you're in an enclosed space only able to hurt yourself, but most of the real world is not like that.
> Stray reflections can easily blind. To emphasize this point, since we're talking about a 450nm laser at either 500mW (maybe just barely low enough to hypothetically qualify as Class 3B?) or 800mW (probably Class 4?), any stray reflections could easily cause blindness before the eye can respond by blinking . Any laser powerful enough to burn or cut is a "why did my eye make a popping sound"[1], risk, not the " blink…
People endanger the public at large all the time, knowingly or unknowingly. There is no decent world in which acts which merely pose a danger to the public are illegal before they cause that danger.
BUT, all of that can be managed with shielding, eye protection, and walls. When the laser is on, I've rigged mach 3 (CNC control) to turn on some lights at the top of my staircase so that nobody comes into the garage without protective eyewear. It is absolutely possible to be safe without also limiting all your freedoms. In general, safety standards and workshop use-cases are well aligned, and if safety is too much work then a lack of safety is not about freedom, it's about laziness.
AvE has also taken a crack at Cubiio, and I think it is worth repeating some of his points, and my own observations here.
1. Diode lasers for engraving are VERY sensitive to focal length changes. If my surface that I am engraving changes more than 1-2mm in height, I try to compensate for that in the engraving tool path. My minimum line width is .01" with the laser/lens combo I have, and if I am out of focus even .125" (3mm), the line width will probably double.
2. many materials reflect terribly while cutting. Especially pre-finished light colored woods like maple. There is practically no way to avoid this. If I cut those I'll often end up with uncut areas in the piece because 100% of the beam ended up scattered, and didn't manage to burn the piece at all.
3. the idea is very tempting. It would be very nice to have this functionality, but, for the average maker, I think you would be pretty unhappy with the power this can make. I frequently want a LOT more than 4W, this appears to be about 1/4 of that. Most commercial systems from Epilog start at 20-40w. The Cubiio would probably produce shallow, uneven cuts at very slow feed rates with really long run times to produce anything useably deep. If you ran it at faster feed rates it would probably produce a laser engraving so shallow that it would rub off.
4. I want their app. The ability to turn scanned art into vectors for G code is something I would pay for. AFAIK there is NO good commercial solution for this. I have tons of line art that I would love to laser engrave but have no way to produce simple paths from it.
Edit: this is the laser I have - https://jtechphotonics.com/?product=3-8w-laser-and-2-5amp-sa... - I can vouch that it is well made and the vendor is great to work with - he assembles these himself and takes safety seriously.