 Today, we're going to check out the MakeBlock LaserBox Pro. My name's Jim and this is the Edge of Tech. So like I said, today I'm going to be checking out the MakeBlock LaserBox Pro. It actually came in three different boxes. The laser in the bottom box, the smoke purifier in the center, and this is actually a bunch of 3mm basswood to test with. I'm going to get this thing unboxed, put up on a table so we can all see it, and then we'll go over some specs. This thing is going to be so much fun. Let's do it. Alright, I got the crate open and I just wanted to show you how this thing was packaged. It came with a bunch of foam on top. It had a wooden top that flipped down and was secured by these metal tabs. And I'm just going to open it up and that's going to reveal the laser that's right underneath. So this is sitting backwards, this is the back of the laser, that's the front of the laser. We're going to get this thing unboxed and put up on a table and let's do it. Alright, I got it out of the crate and up onto the table. And I tell you what, I should have had my wife come out because it really does take two people to do this. You should not do that by yourself. I did it by myself and I would definitely regret it. So have somebody come help you, have a buddy, a friend, a wife, a husband, anybody you got out there, help you get that out of the crate and onto the table because you don't want to break this. It is an expensive machine to break right when you get it. This LaserBox Pro came to us from Xtool. I really appreciated Xtool. Thank you guys for the opportunity to get the laser. Full disclosure, I did pay shipping and tax. Other than that, they sent me the laser for a review unit to have fun and do some videos for you guys online. They advertised the laser as a smart desktop laser. Then it's geared towards makers, small businesses, schools, hobbyists, or just about anybody who wants to get into the laser world. This thing is supposed to have a ton of technology built in and I can't wait to share it with you. But first, let's go step by step in the build process and get this thing running. I think the first thing I'm going to do is peel off this plastic and paper. It's kind of getting in my way. We'll get it off here. Next I'm going to open it up and we'll see what's inside. So we'll just lift the top here and that is really smooth and really nice. I like that a lot. As you can see, there's a bunch of foam and stuff inside here. Let's come in for a closer look. So if we take a look what's inside here, like I said, it's got really tight packed foam, which is great. There is a box here that will come out, a hose. I'm assuming this is for the ventilation part and it appears that the rest of the foam just comes right out and this is the inside of the laser without the foam so far. So I just got the foam out of the inside of the laser and as you can see, it's really nice. It's clean. It's all pretty much black on the inside there and that looks like our laser head. So this looks to be like a very nice machine on the inside. So as you can see as I pan up, it does have a camera right here and we'll go a little more into that later, but it is cool that they built a camera right into the lid. That means if I shut the lid, it's actually going to be a really good look of that build surface and that camera should do a great job for us. So inside the box you see a book, a hose, a hose clamp, a USB cable and the power cable. This is what's inside the laser. Let's pop open the book and see how we put this thing together. So going through the quick start instructions, the manual is very nice. So what I did was I opened the Smart Smoke Purifier that they sent me that does go with the LaserBox Pro. You can get this separate. As you can see, they send a separate tube with it as well. Another box and this is the actual Smart Smoke Purifier. I know you guys wanted to see this part. We'll dive into this in a little bit. So inside of the box that came with the Smart Smoke Purifier, we have two more hose clamps here and we have the cable that will connect between the Purifier and the LaserBox Pro. So what we'll do now is go through the setup of connecting these two together. Okay, so I opened the garage door and I started putting this together and realized I forgot to hit record. So what I did so far was I got the hose that came with it here. I got the hose clamps and I clamped it onto the back and onto the top of the Smoke Purifier. You can tell it goes in the top because there's a circle here that matches the circle here. So the bottom one will be our exhaust and we'll do that coming up. The next thing we want to do is take the included cable to link these two and we're just going to plug this in. So we open this up and it literally just plugs in and attaches just like that. So we're attached. We're going to come over here to the back of the filter here and do the same thing. It plugs right in and it snaps into place. So both ends actually snap in really nice and they should be nice and secure now. The next thing we need to do is put our exhaust on and that's what this little one is. I'm actually going to run this. I'm going to close the garage door, run this up and run it into another laser I have because this is not the final destination of this laser. Eventually this will actually be blowing and vent it out. So I'm going to get this part on. I'm going to get our power plug and let's get this thing powered up. So this is the tube that comes with it and it's not a bad tube. It's actually very heavy duty. It's not huge but it's very heavy duty and as you can see it has all this material in the front. So the trick I found is to spread that open and out otherwise if it's all pushed in here it's very very hard to get it on the end of these tubes. So make sure you come through here and I'm sure there's probably better ways to do this but I spread it all out like this and I push this on over and then I clamp it down. So that's a quick trip if you're struggling to get the hose on your laser. So it does come with a standard power cable as you can see here. It just fits in just like this. It plugs in like that. It does say the operating voltage is 110 so that's good for here in the US. So we plugged it in down there. As you can see it does say it's a class one laser as well and it is time to get this thing fired up. So now that everything is connected in the back I'm going to turn this on and we're going to see what it does. Awesome. So it's all turned on. The lights came on. It looks like there's LEDs under both sides here and we have a flashing button. The next thing the manual tells us to do is go to our computer and we're going to load some software. So if you're looking inside the build area is actually 500 by 300mm which is a good size build area for a machine like this. It does have 22mm of workable height and if you remove the honeycomb tray which it does say you can do you can get 52mm of workable height. Now I believe this whole tray slides out. There's a couple of screws here. You take the screws out and the whole tray slides out. That way it allows you to empty out underneath the honeycomb and anything that might have fallen down after a while. But I tell you 500 by 300 of workable space in here is pretty good. So this is what we have now. Our laser box pro is connected to the wifi. It is turned on as you can see the lights in here. The inside of this thing looks really cool. If I get up in here you can see the honeycomb on the bottom there. You can see the linear rails that they use, the cable chains. There is a water tube back there. This thing is water cooled. There is the laser itself. It's all contained inside of this box. So it all looks very compact and nice in there. I cannot wait to get this thing going. And here's the little button. It's hard to see but it is glowing blue so it's ready to go. Now if we go over here to our make block smart smoke purifier you can see that it's very sleek as well. This thing looks super nice. I mean it looks great on the table. It's going to look great on the shelf I'm going to put it on. And I hope it performs as well as it looks because this thing really does look nice. So I'm just looking at this smart smoke purifier. And I thought, you know what, let's take a closer look. So I open this thing up and this door, this top is very heavy. It is actually a very heavy top there. And if you look right here it tells you what it is. So here's the replacement and if you pop it up this is a cube. And it looks like it has a filters inside of there. And if we spin this around it has filters all the way through. So it does look like the arrows here show which way the airflow should go. And it looks like it's this way. I did pull it out like this. And if you look on the pictures it does show the arrow facing the front of the machine. We get a look inside. It looks like an empty chamber here. That's where the air comes in. It goes through. It looks like your fan is right there. And then it exhausts out the back. So that's pretty cool. I'm just going to set that back in there just like that. And I'm going to close the top and we're going to go on to the next steps. So the next step in the manual is to start our first laser burn. So we got this box right here. It comes with a three millimeter bass wood and three and a half millimeter cardboard. And if you come up here and look you can see the cardboard inside of this one and the bass wood inside of that one. So that's cool that they give you some material to play with. This stuff should actually be auto recognized by the laser. And it should do all of the settings for us. So let's try it. So the next thing it says to do is get a piece of material. And that's what I have here. I grabbed the cardboard for this one. And what we're going to do is set the cardboard in just like this. So once the cardboard is set in there, we are actually going to close the top here. And it's going to turn on. The camera is going to come on and the lights are going to come on. Now what we need to do is run over to the software and let's get our first burn started. So the next thing they say in the manual after turning it on is to go to makeblock.com forward slash maker dash tools forward slash laser box. As you can see, the results were not found. We did find the website, but not the results. So I hovered over hardware. I went over to laser box and I clicked that and it brought us to a new page. And in the top here, it says support. So I'm going to click on support. I'm going to click on download. And here we go. So there is a laser box PC. There is a user manual and a laser box laser what you pick. I'm not sure what that means. We're going to download the laser box PC software right here. Once it's downloaded in the bottom left of the screen here, it should be here. I'm just going to click on it to open it. And I'm going to say yes to the defaults here. So I'm going to hit next, next, next install. And it should install the laser box software. If you get a pop up for Windows firewall, Defender or anything like that, allow access if you want to allow it. Obviously that's per case. But in my case, we are going to allow it. And then we're going to hit OK. And it opens up a brand new software window here. Once the software opens up, it says, how do you prefer to connect to a new laser box or connect to a networked laser box? So I'm going to choose to connect a new laser box. So I hit new and I hit next. In my case, I'm going to use Wi-Fi. You can do a straight plug in ethernet. You can do USB all the time if you want. But I thought it would be fun to connect this thing on Wi-Fi. So I hit next and I did plug the USB cable into the laser box pro and into my computer. And now it's asking for my Wi-Fi name and password. So if you open up, it should find your Wi-Fi name and we'll type our password and we'll hit next. And once it connects, you'll see a connected successfully. And I actually verbally heard a beep on the laser itself. So I hit finish and I believe we're connected. So now we jump over here to the software and this is where we want to choose our first project. And they have a ton of stuff on here, some really cool stuff. But I want to do something kind of simple, something easy for the video. And I think I'm going to do this box. So it's going to load the project. It's going to identify the material. It looks like in my case there's a new version of the firmware that we need to update. So before we can get started, let's update the firmware. So it looks like it's going to download the firmware now and then it's going to push it up to the laser via Wi-Fi because that's how I'm connected to the laser now. This whole time in real time, this is taking me about 15 to 20 seconds so far to download. It does look like it's going to take a little bit of time. So we'll let this go and we'll be right back. Now I was watching the laser when this happened and it was pretty cool. The lights flashed, it reset itself, it turned itself off and on a couple times and now it's all back into the ready status. So what you're looking at now is actually the camera that we talked about earlier that's in the top of the lid. That is showing us our material here and it's showing us how this is actually going to be cut out. I placed the cardboard in here based on the picture of the manual. We could use it like this and all we would have to do is grab this and spin it around. And the cool thing about this is we can actually position it anywhere we want on this material as long as it fits on the material and you're going to be good to go. Now this is all the different pieces of that box we're going to build and it's really cool that it's actually showing us on the material what it's going to look like where it's going to be. So all of these lines here are actually going to be cuts. In the top right you can see there's cut and engrave here. So we want to cut this out. We don't just want to engrave it. In the top here it knows that it's three and a half millimeter cardboard and it looks like there's a whole bunch of different stuff you can get from them. In this case we are using the three and a half millimeter cardboard which is really cool. It did find the power and the speed and the number of passes it should take. I'm going to leave that all default. I got it rotated so everything is on the cardboard. I'm going to move it down just a little bit so it's off that edge. So up in the top right you see it says this is our laser box. What I want to do is click the little blue start button. This is the F6 key or this button right here and it opens it up and it tells us the estimated work time is two minutes 21 seconds which is really cool. We can preview the track if we want and it'll actually go through how it's going to do it. We don't need to do that. So what I want to do now is send this to the laser. So I hit the send button and on my laser I just heard it beep. So we're going to jump back over there. It tells us to hit the start button and we're going to do that now and let's see what we get. So I got over here and the button on the right front is flashing blue and that means it's ready to go. So we're going to hit this button and start that burn. So I have the camera positioned over the top here so we can see what happens because we cannot open this door. If we open the door the whole laser will stop. That's a safety feature of this laser. So I hit the blue button and here we go. As you can see it's doing the cuts you can see right in here that it's cutting that cardboard out and doing everything for us right inside of there. So it looks like it finished now. Everything looks like it cut really well and the button actually over here is green now. I don't know if you can hear it because we probably did a time lapse but everything just shut itself down. So the ventilation, the air pump, everything just shut down when we were done and like I said this button is green now. So I'm going to hit that button and nothing happens. So I lifted the door and I opened everything up and as you can see it looks like everything cut out really nicely. It is again cardboard. So if we lift this up everything kind of just falls out. This is going to stick a little bit because of that sticker but that's okay. So there's all the pieces here and we can put this together and make ourselves a little box. So I'm just looking at all the pieces here and you can tell that there's a little bit of charring on the edges and stuff like that. Maybe it could have gone a little bit faster but all in all it only took about two minutes. There's all the little cutouts they kind of fell down which is awesome. And all in all it only took about two minutes here and this box is going to be pretty fun to put together. And I put our little box together and this is what it looks like. It has a little lid here, it closes, it opens and it's a really fun little project that took about two and a half minutes to do on cardboard. Now I want to see this done in like acrylic or wood. The only problem with cardboard is it doesn't stay together the best without some glue so when you try to open and close it it may fall apart. But it looks really nice but the design was really cool and I really like that they include some of these fun designs to start with. The next really cool thing you can do is just take a piece of the material that they have or any material, take a black marker and you can write whatever you want. So I'm just going to do, how about we do a gym and then we better get creative. So we wrote gym and marker in a very creative non-artistic type of way. And all we have to do now is close the door here. We hit the blue button, it turns everything on and it's actually going to cut this out for us. So there we go, the image starts and it's actually going to cut it out for us. We'll speed this up real quick for you. So as you can see when it's done you can lift this up and the letters just fall out. Now I used a thick marker so it looks like a double cut everything but that's pretty cool. We actually have like a stencil now of my really artistic gym. Or we have the cutouts of the letters if you want to use those too and like I said because I used a thick marker it actually double cut some things which is really interesting. It didn't do that on these two but it definitely did on the J. But that's what we're left with and it looks really cool. You can do any drawings or writing and it'll cut it out right for you just by hitting one button. You can see I did want a little bit thinner like this and it came out really well too. This is kind of a fun thing to do if you want to have your kids draw or anybody draw and then have it kind of cut out on the cardboard or any substrate that you're using in this case we're still using that cardboard. So the next thing we're going to try is some image extrapolation which means you can take any image you want and throw it down here and it should be able to recognize it and then cut it or burn it on this side. So I'm actually going to slide this over and put this down so it's kind of low here. I don't want it hitting. And then what we're going to do is we're going to close the lid. So now you can see our image and our workspace here. Now we need to run over to the computer. All right. So what we want to do now is go back to the software. We have our image loaded and we have our material loaded. So you hit that plus button and it's going to identify the material quick and you can see the camera. It's showing our material here and the coaster the image that I did. Then we want to go to the marquee button and hit that and it says draw a square around the image that you want to extract or press the escape button to return. So let's see if we can get it all in there. So I drew my square and I'm going to make it a little bit bigger because I didn't quite get it all in there. And then I'm going to kind of make it shorter here because we don't need all that coaster part in there. I really don't want this part in here. So you can actually take this eraser that's right here and you can come in and erase some of the stuff that it's seeing. So right away I see with my coaster here it's actually picking up a whole bunch of dots on that coaster that it thinks is part of the image. Now I did throw something kind of difficult at it right away. I didn't just grab a piece of paper with a picture on it or something like that. But what I'm going to do is just kind of get rid of these corners because I don't want them to burn. And if you wanted to you could go through and just get rid of all of the little dots. I'm going to leave them in there for video sake. But it's kind of cool that you can actually go in and mark out stuff you don't want to see. When I'm ready I hit that checkbox and you can see the image here. I move that image over to where I want it to be on this material. I'm going to use this top corner because I want to use this material again. It looks like you can actually center it or kind of line it up if you want to. So we'll do it like that because my board as you can see the cardboard is not straight in there. And I'm going to do it in grave. It already thinks 35% power, 100% speed and one pass. So now all I have to do is go up to the top corner. We have our picture here. I have no idea how this is going to look on the cardboard, but we're going to find out. I'm going to hit start. I'm going to send it. It's going to take seven minutes and 52 seconds. I'm going to hit send. Something quick to see on the app itself. It actually shows you the path and how much time is remaining. I think that's pretty cool because you can keep track of everything while you're working on other stuff. Now, it doesn't look like you can keep working in the app itself while there's a burn going. But the cool part is you can see how much time is remaining. In this case, on that Gryffindor burn, we have about a minute and seven seconds left. And then we can do something new. But you can also pause it from here. So if I hit this button, it'll pause the laser. You can actually pause the laser also by pressing the blue button on the laser itself. So I dropped it down to 10% on this engrave. And I just wanted to show you the difference. This one is definitely not cut in. It's more just kind of burnt on. I probably should have brought this up to like 15% or 18%. But I wanted to see how much of a difference 10% made. And I like that the laser was actually firing at 10% as well. If I zoom in, you can see this one really cut off a lot at 35%. It looks cool, but not exactly engraved. So I'm going to keep dialing this in, but it is really cool that it'll do that and engrave on the wood or anything else you put in here for you. So this thing's really cool. We went through and we did some cutting on the material that came with it. In this case, it was that cardboard. And in this case, I was able to draw my name on these boards and it actually just cut it out automatically. And that's one of the cool things about this is that you did not have to be connected to the internet for that part. If you do it in black, it'll do engraving. If you do it in red, it'll actually cut. I only did it in black because that's all I had. But I tell you, it's really cool when you can just draw a material, set it in the laser, hit the button, and it'll do it for you. We made a little box and that was the first project we did. And that came right from the software. It was really easy. I just picked it. I sent it to the printer. I hit the button and we were good to go. This thing is running completely wireless as far as the network goes. But besides being wireless, you can actually do USB so you can plug it straight in. You don't have to have Wi-Fi at your house at all. Or you can hardwire it to your router or your network, which is another great option as well. I can see putting these on Wi-Fi or hardwired in something like a makerspace or a school where you could have computers in one area and your laser is in another area. You can design, you can send everything right to it, walk up and hit the button. I love that it's so simple and it's such a cool feature to actually send it and have that feedback right here where you hit the button and everything starts. As you saw while we were testing, the five megapixel camera auto-focused everything in. It read the little code on the cardboard and identified the cardboard for us and we were able to see our material in real time and put our layout right on top of it. It didn't matter if it was a little bit crooked, if it was horizontal, if it was vertical, it didn't matter. You have the option to actually drop your design right on it and line it up how you want it to cut. This is a really cool thing because then if you have something like we did with the engraving where we only used the top corner, I can still use the rest of that sheet. I can add other pieces in where it'll engrave or cut right on that sheet and I don't have as much waste. And that's very important in the laser world because there really is a ton of waste when you don't have that. The other thing I really like about the camera is that unlike my 50 watt laser over here that doesn't have a camera, I don't have to run back and forth and line it up five or 10 times or whatever it is to get everything lined up. It's very similar to the camera that's used in Lightburn which I'll be adding to my 50 watt laser but this is already built in, it's built into the lid and I think it's a great addition for such a very sophisticated laser like this. In addition to the camera, this thing actually auto levels as well. So when you go in and it determines what material you're using, the laser actually auto levels inside to get the right focal length. If you don't have their material and you're using your own, as long as you know how thick it is, you actually enter that yourself and it'll auto level that way you're always getting the right focal length, you never have to worry about that part. As you saw, I've been standing here filming and this actually kind of went down into a shutdown mode. I wanted to do this while it was on because this thing is really not that loud. Now, once it fires up and you got your pure fire going, then it kind of gets a little bit loud but all laser printers are loud. This one's not too bad. It definitely could be used in a probably a more noisy environment like a classroom or definitely a garage or maker space. This can do stuff on several different materials just like any other CO2 laser. The cool thing about this is if you use make blocks materials, it automatically detects it. If you don't, as long as you know what the material is and how thick it is, it'll do it. And you can actually adjust all the settings as you saw when I did that engraving as well. Another thing about the laser is it supports a huge range of file formats. All of the popular formats are supported. You don't have to worry about if you're just pulling a JPEG or an SVG in. If you're using CoralDraw, it'll work with the LaserBox Pro. I'm gonna be testing a lot of that. We're gonna be doing a lot of coasters. I'm gonna do some sign engraving. I'm gonna get a lot of use out of the wood here that came with it and I'm gonna see if I can make some ornaments for Christmas too. But those are some videos I have coming up. For this one, I just wanted to do the unboxing and walk through the setup and some of the fun features. Another cool thing about this laser is it has eight different sensors for safety. If something gets blocked in your air filter, it'll let you know. If something's going on the side of the laser, it'll let you know. Like I said, it has eight different sensors. And one of those sensors is if the door is open. So if you open the door like this, it'll actually pause the engrave or the cut while the door is open. When you're done, you close the door and it'll actually keep going. It's really cool. You can do that from the software too, but it's a really safe thing. If you're running this in a classroom and a kid comes up and opens this door, you can hear it, it beeps, it'll stop everything. That way no one gets hurt, no one gets burnt by the laser or anything like that. No little hands can come in. I really like that feature. And I think all CO2 lasers should have that just because it's really easy to forget that the beam is going in and you can stick your hand in and get burnt. Let's talk about price just for a second. So normally I think this is about a $6,000 laser. It goes for about $5,500 on sale. And I think at the time of filming this, it was right before Black Friday in the year 2020. And they have a sale going on right now. You get the laser, you get the smoke purifier, you get the material, you get some material to play with and you also get another filter cartridge to go in here. That's a really good deal if you compare it to some of the other smart CO2 lasers out there. And one of the big benefits about this is you don't have to have the internet. You can plug this straight into a computer. You don't have to be online. And that is a huge benefit over something like the Glowforge where you have to plug in. Now the Glowforge has other options and stuff as well, but you have to be connected to the internet to use it. In this case, if you're in an area you don't have internet, like in the country maybe, you don't have to have it. As long as you have the software on your computer, you plug in USB and you're good to go. But I do think that 4895 is still kind of expensive for a laser, but in this case, I really think that with all the technology you're getting here, the camera, everything reading, the autofocus, the autofocus of the laser itself, being able to draw right on material, putting it in, it reading it and cutting it out or engraving it, the filtration system that helps filter the air before it pumps it out. You're not just pumping the bad air out into the environment. This is actually gonna be pumping outside of my house, so it'll filter. And then from the second tube, it'll go right outside, which is a really cool option because at least you're getting some of that filtered out. The look of this thing is awesome and I tell you, for 4895 it's not a bad deal. If you have that money laying around, if you're looking for a really smart sophisticated laser, this is one that I would definitely check out. Now I don't have another smart laser to compare this to, but I do have a 50 watt CO2 laser over here and right here I have a five and a half watt diode laser. And you see a lot of my videos are on that diode laser so far. With that being said, I don't think it's that bad for all the technology and what you get in this package. If you had one of these, let me know in the description below what you would do with it. Would it be engraving? Would it be cutting? Would it be carving? Would it be making coasters? Anything you would do. Give me some ideas down below in the comments and maybe I'll do them on some of my next videos. I hope you guys love the MakeBlock LaserBox Pro. Thank you so much to X-Tool for sending this thing out. I really appreciate that. I can't wait to start playing with this thing and getting some more videos out there for you. I hope you guys learned something today and as always, keep prittin'. Or should I say keep burnin' in this case. What's up everybody? 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