The manufacture of laser engraver

Today I’ll share with you a project finished a while ago---- a low-cost laser engra-ving machine. Due to the low cost and parts that easy to get, you can quickly make a copy.
Be careful: there is a 250 mv laser in this project, and the laser beam does great harm to our eyes, so please don’t look into the laser beam.

Tools and materials needed: Banana Pro, two scrap CD drivers, two drive circuits of Stepper motor, a 250mv laser head, a drive circuit of laser. (following the principle of more easily to get, laser driver circuit and stepper motor drive circuit are done with the same kind of module - L298N).

Manufacturing process
1 Disassemble CD drivers
Process that disassembling CD drivers will not be showed in detail, the reason we break the CD drivers is we just want to reuse the stepper motor and slider, so please
don’t break them.

2 Machine case
In order to make the appearance of this engraving machine more beautiful, making a wooden shell by laser cutting machine in the laboratory, and installing the stepper motors , one is responsible for the X axis, the other one is for the Y axis.

Click here to download the CAD drawing of the wooden box :

3 Install the circuit
The circuit is made of one Banana Pro, three driving module, a laser.
One of the L298N modules is used to drive the laser .In order to prevent excess-ive current, I connected an adjustable resistor in the middle. The other two L298N modules are used to drive the two step motors.
(There are two drive modules in the back. )

4 Wiring

When wiring, pay attention to 4 I/O ports of Banana Pro for the control of 4 wire stepper motor. For example: the above stepper motor is controlled by NO.36, 37, 38, 39 I/O ports, the following stepper motor is controlled by NO.26, 27, 28, 29 I/O ports. The laser also needs one I/O port of Banana Pro to be controlled. Here we select NO.11 I/O port. Besides we propose to separate the power supply of Banana Pro and other drive modules.

5 Install the software
You need to install two parts of the program: install the Inkscape software and the Laser Engraver Extension plug-in on your PC, and install Python’s GPIO libraries and carving packages. Inkscape can be downloaded on the Internet. The download address of Laser Engraver Extension plug-in:
Install Inkscape according to the installation instructions.
Then extract the Laser Engraver Extension, place the extracted files to the Inkscape installation directory /extensions, restart Inkscape, and there will be an extra plug-in in Inkscape. So you can generate G code with the Inkscape.

In the Banana Pro,you need to download the Python code controlling stepper motor
Download address:

Assuming that the path of code which has been extracted is /home/bananapi/laser
_engraver, then copy the G code to the file. Assuming that the name of the G code file is test.nc, run ./engraver.py test.nc in the terminal.
Note: before the first time you run the code, you need to test the origin of the stepper motor’s position, and adjust the focus of laser.

it’s a good project. I‘m wondering to what product you used?

I will not sell it, you can make your own ~! the hardware I use is Banana Pro. Other things you can buy it on market

I think it should be Banana Pro. But what is Banana Pro, I only heard of Banana Pi before.
“Tools and materials needed: Banana Pro, two scrap CD drivers, two drive circuits of Stepper motor, a 250mv laser head, a drive circuit of laser. (following the principle of more easily to get, laser driver circuit and stepper motor drive circuit are done with the same kind of module - L298N).”