DIY Rotary Attachment for my DIY Laser Cutter

Engraving cylindrical objects. This may surprise you but I've never actually tried it before so let's make a quick rotary attachment for the laser cutter and give it a shot. I've designed this simple one which was inspired by one built by Gigsmithing. Link to his video in the description. What I like about it is that I can make it out of parts I already have on hand. So I'll start by cutting these base pieces from eight millimeter clear acrylic but anything thicker than six millimeters will work fine and if your laser can't cut something that thick you could always just glue two three millimeter thick pieces together after you cut them. I'm drilling and tapping a thread into the sides here so I can lock the bearings in place which will make more sense in just a minute. And then off camera I also tapped a thread into the ends of these aluminum extrusions. They're just a couple of pieces of open beam that I had lying around from a previous 3d printer build. Now I can make the roller assembly starting with the classic skateboard bearing which is gently persuaded into the eight millimeter steel rod. Next on is a 16 tooth pulley, a few rubber o-rings and finally another bearing. For the timing belt I'm crudely making a length into a closed loop by super gluing the ends together. This will work temporarily if you don't put too much tension on it and should do the trick for us today. After that you want to have the realization that you should have done the belt first before you installed the rollers. That looks like it's working so time to get it in the machine. I'm using this can of beans because it was the first cylindrical object that I had to hand. I don't know what that says about my culinary habits but it makes a good test piece regardless. Setting up the rotary axis begins by lining up the gantry over the top center of the can and setting the height as this will be where the laser engraves. Then I turn power off to the machine and swap the y-axis stepper motor to the stepper motor in the rotary attachment. You can set up more convenient methods of switching axes if it's something you do often and I'll put some additional information down in the description. Now when I turn the machine back on it'll try to home the disconnected y-axis so just hit escape on your control panel to cancel that. And now you should have full control over your bean can turner by using the y-axis buttons. Next we want to jump into our software and set the configuration. I'm using Lightburn this time around because its rotary axis setup is a bit more intuitive than RDworks. So in the setup menu we want the roller type on. Enable the rotary obviously. I also mirrored the output but that will depend on how your axes are wired. My steps per rotation is set by my driver is 6400. The rubber o-rings that are on my rollers have a diameter of 10.5 millimeters and my bean can has a diameter of 73 millimeters. This calculates the Just to confirm it's doing what it says it's doing I'll send a rectangle to the machine that's the same length as the circumference. So if I mark a line here where it starts it should spin one full rotation and back again. With that confirmed I can run a test. And now I can live my dream of having my own brand of beans. Inflated now with a sense of confidence I'm ramping up the commitment level to this $10 drink bottle. And after changing only the diameter setting in Lightburn I can run a slightly more powerful engrave to try burn through the masking tape and the layer of black paint. It looks like I set my power level too low to quite make it through so I'll just run it a second time. This is literally my first test on the bottle so I'm quite cautious about setting the power too high and melting things. I think it's much better to start low and work your way up. This time around it looks like it's gone through fully and is exposing the metal nicely. I'm not convinced I needed the masking tape but I figured it couldn't hurt. As it was it came out pretty cleanly so I could probably have gotten away with just giving it a wipe down after. And there we go. I'm actually impressed with how nicely this came out first try. Those edges are super crisp especially for having gone through twice. If you'd like to give this a go yourself my cut files will be free on my website and the links for the parts I used will be down below. That's it for me today, I'll catch you on the next one.