2019

During the study Creative Technology there was a module called Smart Technolgy, where we dived deeper into the workings of electroncis and control systems. This resulted in a very theoretical module. For that reason the lecturers decided to include a small project into this module, a Hackaton!

"A Hackathon is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours." - Wikipedia, 2022

During this hackaton we were given 3.5 days to make a project. The parts we were allowed to use were: stuff we had at home, old electronics devices we sourced ourselfes, and the lasercutter of our study.

When brainstorming quickly we found that we could use the laser of cd-rom drives to engrave into wood, therefore the decision was made to try and create a laser engraver in this short period of time.

We used different parts to make this happen. The base was made from and old scanner, utilizing the stepper motor and frame to make the first axis. The second axis was made using the cd-rom drives' ejection mechanism with an encoder to control the movement. Testing the cd-rom drives' engraving power it was found that it was not strong enough, so a stronger laser was provided by the staff, luckily.

Putting it all together with some lasercut pieces it came out like a real looking machine. It was able to create small engravings, all be it with small resolution. Due to time issues it was not possible to integrate the software which was written to outline pictures and convert them to lasercuttable files.

But the result still was stunning, and we managed to win the Jury Prize of Hackaton 2019.