I wonder how difficult it would be to mount this laser head on my Snapmaker 2.0:
Duct tape would do the trick.
-S
I have a alternative solution - Hot Glue (Its a trick from my grandpa)
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well, mounting it shouldnt be hard, you can print an adaptor, but the question is can you control it with the snapmaker
what does the snapmaker cable have, voltage, ground, pwm and i think i heard a direction pin.
so i think if you had a 12v power supply controlled by a relay on the voltage and ground and combined the ground from the snapmaker and the 12v supply, i think the pwm would work and can probably just jump direction to ground
not clear on if that is sufficient or if there is more to it than that
Yeah, stands in my garage, but haven’t used it for a year now.
It’s delivered by default with a pond pump for cooling, so you need a bucket with water standing in the near to use it. The exhaust system is not really good. The Laser power is enough for 6mm plywood, but you need to mod it for beeing really useful. Just made some wood signs, and wood coins with it in good speed. I also engraved glass and etched aluminium. It needs definetly some modding to be really useful.
There are some Howtos around to mod it, like air assist, leveled bed and so on.
Oh and grounding needs to be improved too ;D
This thing is more work than a snapmaker 
- but fun.
Sigh. I’ll pass then.
I also have one. Cuts and engraves far faster, but like a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, it can really benefit from some upgrading, such as a new controller board, better lens, better 3rd mirror / lens mount, air-assist nozzle, etc. Some of them are built a lot better than others. It’s nice to be able to do an etch in 45 seconds vs 20+ minutes with the Snapmaker, and with a controller update it does actual greyscale instead of dithering. BTW, do NOT use the ground lug. That’s an artifact of Chinese outlets that generally don’t have a ground wire. Plenty on the web about it, both wrong and right.
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@C.Harris You are correct. I must have read the chart wrong and I just realized I couldn’t see the sticker on the front of the laser while wearing the laser safety glasses. 
Dünnes Holz (2mm) sägt das Ding durch. Wenn man bei Pappe nicht aufpasst, verschmort alles und nichts ist mehr zu erkennen.
I used 2mm balsa wood and easily cut through it with the 1600mW SM 2.0 laser
Is it possible to use gold cutting using this laser sm2.0 laser ?
cnc work with 2mm gold sheet ?
No. Not powerful enough. Material needs to absorb the energy for it to cut.
Plus I’m not sure it would be safe or good for the laser with the amount of reflection.
-S
@sdj544 curious, what laser actually would cut gold at the minimum? It’s fairly soft but I don’t know what would do it, especially with reflectivity as you said.
Some good information, with physical detail, at link below. 2 mm copper clocks in at 1.5 kW laser power; gold will be higher because it’s both more reflective and more thermally conductive.
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Yea, I could see a fiber laser working on gold. But oh god would I not want to be anywhere near that thing when its cutting, from what I’ve seen of fiber lasers, they angle the beam to move the cuts, with the reflectiveness of gold, I would expect that means super powerful lasers bouncing off in every direction from the work piece.
Unfortunately, your neighbour has been duped by the Chinese marketeers. The diode laser cutters sold on Aliexpress, eBay, Amazon etc. usually quote the ELECTRICAL input power to the laser diode, not the OPTICAL output power. Although laser diodes are typically more efficient than other laser types, most of the cheap Chines laser diode modules have efficiencies of less than 25%. This means that your neighbour has a laser with an optical power of maybe 750mW, and it could be as low as 500mW. The optical power of his laser is unlikely to be greater than 1000mW.
Snapmaker, on the other hand, have chosen to quote the actual optical power of the laser module, which means that the electrical input power to the laser could be anything up to 10 Watts (my guess is that it’s around 5 or 6W). It really isn’t that important because the laser module has been designed to work with the rest of the snapmaker, so the electrical input power to the laser isn’t a selling point.
It’s also worth noting that the power quoted for CO2 lasers is usually the optical output power as well. It’s tricky to get an idea of the electrical input power to the laser tube, but we can guess from the specifications of the power supply. The anode voltage is usually around 20kV, and the anode current is usually around 20mA, making the electrical input power around 400W. This means an efficiency of around 10%. CO2 lasers have efficiencies between 5% and 20%, so 10% is in the right ballpark.
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Would a 3rd party blue diode laser work with an A350 and latest firmware and Lightburn? I understand the power cable would need rewired to suit the connections on the 3rd party laser module. I currently have the 1600mw laser.
Any guidance is welcome
Regards
Graeme Craig
It depends on your willingness to tinker/engineer. It is certainly more to be done than just rewire a few cables. You need to set up communications between the laser and the SM2 controller (via CAN bus), get power levels right (SM2 delivers 24V), and get the PWM right. A shortcut may be to dismantle the 1.6 W laser module and reuse parts from it. So, yes: Can be done. But you need to invest time and thinking and you need to understand what you are doing.
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You can use the pcb of the 1,6 W-Module to control a separate Lasermodule