OMTech Polar Desktop Laser SetUp Test and Review

We got a new toy, the Omtec Polar. We're gonna set it up and test it out right now. What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do it, build it, or make it? So do we. We have a new video each week. This week we got a new toy. Omtec sent us the new Polar 350. Yes, it's their new desktop laser. It's a 50 watt laser with a 12 by 20 bed. Actually it's 11.8 by 20.1 to be exact, and it has all the bells and whistles. It has an onboard camera, a water chiller, air assist, its exhaust has an external inline fan to go with it, and I'm really excited about its rotary tool. Yes. And it uses industry standard software. So I know if you've heard of lasers, you've heard of light burn, and it uses light burn. So we're excited to unbox this thing, set it up, and do our first test cut. Step one, we're going to unbox it. This thing was delivered by freight. They used a lift gate and a pallet jack to actually get it into our warehouse. From there, it was too heavy to lift and bring in, so we thought we would uncrate it out in the warehouse, and then hopefully it would be a little lighter to bring in. Yeah, so we were able to see what came in the box. We had all kinds of goodies here. You can see the inline fan. You can see all the hoses and cables, all kinds of goodies. We took those out, and then it had these cool straps on it. Yeah, it was ready to be lifted. Yeah, well I was a little nervous that once we lifted it with those straps, I was like, are they attached on the bottom? It's not going to slide off, is it? I had faith I just lifted. We did. We just lifted, but then later when I got it onto the desk, there was nothing holding them on. They could have slipped off. Well, it was hooked on the little feet on the bottom, and once we got it out of the crate, we did notice that that's where the extra materials were, like all their sample materials, and these are nice size sample materials. Yeah, 12 by 20 sheets of acrylic. There's five sheets there. Some cardboard and some birch. Yeah, then the tumbler tool was actually like on the side. It was packaged. This is part of the side foam. Tucked in the side foam. So don't throw away your crate until you check all your foam. Step two, hardware setup. This thing is 104 pounds, so it did take two of us to get it up onto the table, but it really only takes one of us to set it up. That's right, and that was me. So we started with the exhaust. We started with the ventilation hoses. There's two sizes, a small hose and a large hose. We started with the small hose and added that to the back of the laser and clamped it down. Then we added the reducer to the intake of the inline fan. Here Garrett is showing to stretch the reducer a little bit. We're adding a little heat and it makes it a little bit flexible so that it slides on nice and tight, and then we attach the other end of the small hose to the reducer and clamp it down. And then on the other end of the inline fan, we will attach one end of the large hose and clamp it down. The other end of the large hose is used for your exhaust, so you'll either exhaust that out of a window, out of your garage, or you may even attach it to a filter. Then we'll attach the power cord. After that, we added the remote interlock connector. So in your little toolbox, you'll see that the remote interlock connector and the keys are zip-tied together. This is a two-part power system. The first part of the power will be to add this interlock connector in the back, so we'll just plug that in. While we're here, we're going to go ahead and turn the beam attenuator all the way up so that you'll feel it stop. It's at 100 percent. We'll come around the front and we'll add the crumb tray and check our coolant level. You want to make sure that this is full. We'll go ahead and plug in our machine, flip the switch in the back, come back to the front and add our key, turn the key on, and suddenly we have power. Once it's powered up, we're going to double check and ensure that the air assist is flowing. So you can see setup was really very easy. It's simply attaching these hoses, adding the power, turning it on. Yeah, I mean that was pretty easy. Step three, software setup. We're going to start by adding these two USB cables into the back of the laser. One is for the camera, one is for the laser. Next, we're going to go into Lightburn. Now we already had Lightburn. We use Lightburn on other lasers like our X-Tool and the other Omtech lasers. To add our laser, we went to devices, find my laser. It found it on the USB. We're going to select the serial USB. We're going to go next. I'm going to name it polar. I'm going to verify my bed size. This is millimeters. I'm going to assume it's okay. We should make sure that the laser starts at the top right and I'm going to say okay. Back to the devices drop down and we're going to select polar. Next, we did a little test by drawing a square and framing it out just to make sure that the two were talking. Software installation and getting it to talk to the software was also super easy. That's usually where a lot of things get sticky. Yes, the software setup is super simple. You can't hardly mess it up with the USB direct connect cables. It does connect through Wi-Fi. We just haven't set that up yet. That'll be something we try later. Step four, time to set up the camera. Now, this is pretty easy as well. This is all done through Lightburn. In Lightburn, we're going to go to the menu laser tools, select calibrate camera lens, select your camera. Ours is the bottom one on this list and here you should be able to see your camera view and see your laser bed. We're going to select fish eye lens and hit next. Now, the first step it's going to tell you is to print out this little dot pattern. Yeah, this dot pattern. Now, what we didn't realize and learned later is that you can't just use this. You're going to have to hold this dot pattern up. Yeah, you're going to have to put it on an angle and you can't just hold it like this because it's too floppy and too angled. You're definitely going to want to glue this or paste it or tape it. Yes, attach it somehow to something stiff. A little piece of cardboard. We had this little piece of MDF laying around so we made sure that we did it with this MDF behind it. From here, you're going to use that dot pattern to align your camera. You're going to have to pay attention to this diagram in the upper left corner. It's going to show you where your dot pattern needs to be in relation to your camera. The picture on the right just shows you where your dot pattern will sit on the laser bed. You're going to move this dot pattern around and you're going to do this nine times. The dot pattern is going to be positioned kind of like a tic-tac-toe board. There are three boxes across the top, three in the middle, three at the bottom, and you're going to position this dot pattern in each of those nine boxes and capture it each time. Pay attention when you get to the side boxes and the corner boxes. The view in this diagram in the top left is going to have you angle your dot pattern in such a way that the camera is picking it up at an angle. That's how you're going to get your something less than one score. Now we never got our score down to this 0.3 or less ideal that it speaks of. We got ours under one. That was the closest we could get but it seems to be okay for us and we just continued through each of the different capture windows until we got to the end and finish. Once your camera setup is complete you're going to go back to calibrate camera alignment. Our camera on this laser is mounted to the lid so we're just going to make sure that that lid is closed. So here we're going to enter our material thickness. We're using eighth inch birch so we're going to select three millimeters. We're going to set our fill speed, fill power, our line speed, our line power, and then we're going to keep it at a 100 scale for this size laser. We're going to frame it and then hit start and it's going to engrave this pattern sample image and pattern over here on the right. Once the test pattern is complete you're going to hit next and now you're going to align the crosshairs to the center of each of the numbered test patterns and put it right in the center. Well as close to the center as you can and click on each one. You're going to do this four times. Once you're done you're going to click capture image. If during calibration when you're lining those crosshairs your image looks upside down that seemed to be okay for us. We were a little concerned about that but once we completed the next step and refreshed the image the orientation was correct on our screen. So I think it's supposed to be that way. Yeah and that wasn't too bad. I mean it was tedious and we never actually hit uh I guess perfect but it wasn't that bad. We were still within that less than one score so the camera seems to be aligned and calibrated correctly. It might be off a couple of millimeters. Maybe in the future we try it again if that proves to be an issue. Yeah when we're doing something super intricate but right now it seems to be working as is. Step five. Time for a test cut. Everything is set up. Everything is ready to go and I found an Omtek light burn laser cut test file. Yeah that is a mouthful and we're gonna go ahead and run that. I'm gonna leave all the settings as is like I downloaded it except I'm gonna change the engrave settings to be 150 speed 50 power and 300 dpi. Let's see how it goes. All right well that came out great and I love this little card. This little card is great because now I know what all of my best speed and power settings are for this eighth inch birch. If I do this for all my materials I'll know what all of my materials perfect settings will be. Yeah what those perfect settings would be. Yeah you can tell that some of the holes where it did start cutting you can see where it started to burn the hole and then that golden brown is what you want. That's the perfect speed and power setting. You can see some that almost came through but didn't quite make it so this is a great little file. We'll put a link to this little file down below so you guys can use it as well. I'm really excited about this new laser. I think this is a great starter laser so there's a little less hand-holding than on the glowforge with this one but it's a great it still has all those safety features. It's a great way to start learning lasers and because we're using light burn or if you start with light burn it's a great way to start understanding that industry standard software almost all the lasers lasers work with light burn so it's a great tool to start with. Now you don't have to start with light burn it does come with its own software RD works but our recommendation is go ahead and pay for that light burn license and start using that tool. I can't wait to do more videos with this. This was just a setup video an unboxing and a setup this week but we're really excited to start using the tumbler tool. Yes I cannot wait to get into that rotary tool. Yeah yeah I'm looking forward to it and all the kind of fun things we make with it and I agree with you totally this it doesn't have all the hand-holding that glowforge does but it it's not nearly as hard to set up as the 80 watt laser was. Yeah we didn't have to align mirrors on this one we didn't have to set up a separate water chiller and understand how the water chiller works it's all built in so it's a great starter laser again once you go from this one to the next one if you decide you want a bigger laser in the future light burn you'll already know how to use that same software. And you know who knows about that light burn software? A lot of our patrons know about that light burn software. We talk lasers all the time over there on Patreon I'm always giving them files that go right in the light burn all the files that I make are made for light burn and they use them they give me feedback they make some of their own so good job patrons great way to go guys. And we do appreciate if you like watching our videos give us that thumbs up make a comment give us some interaction it really does help out our videos in the long run. We're about out of time I have to go find something to do you have to go find something to do until Tuesday where we'll see you for test cut Tuesday it's another laser thing that we do and then we'll see you next Friday where we'll do it build it and make it again.