 Okay, I have been, I might look a mess because I got off a 24-hour shift at work at eight this morning, went to two hours of karate class, went shopping at Sam's Club, went shopping at Publix, came home, and it's now one in the afternoon, and I've been going non-stop, I'm tired, but I got this package yesterday while I was at work, and I'm very excited, and I hope it works halfway through. So what it is is, it's hopefully a laser engraver. It's very light, I know it's gonna be small, but I thought it'd be heavier than this, but it almost fits in the boxes empty. This is just under $100, it was $90 some dollars, and it's supposed to be two-day shipping, so I thought it was gonna come in the day, but they actually shipped it out, and I came in yesterday while I was at work. Now I've wanted a laser engraver for years. In fact, a couple of years ago, maybe three, four years ago, I spent $400 on one. It came, it was much bigger than this. This one can only print on very small areas, so it's very small. The other one wasn't much bigger, but it was a huge unit with a water pump to cool it down, and a vacuum thing to suck the smoke away. I got it, and I was gonna use CNC Linux, which is a special distribution of Linux, for using CNC machines, like laser engravers and other tools such as that, which requires a serial port connection, and when I ordered the device, the title said that it was a laser engraver, and it said USB or serial. I thought that meant that it did both. Well, they sent me a USB model. It didn't have serial, so I sent it back. I'm like, you know what, that was too much of a headache. I'm not buying another one. This one was, like I said, just under $100, very small, washed lots of videos on it, and so hopefully it works. Now I do a lot of little woodwork, nothing fancy, but I do little trays for people and stuff like that, and I'd love to burn a logo on it. I also have coming in the mail a day, a bunch of little wooden coins that I can burn logos on and stuff like that. So I checked to make sure that this is compatible with Linux, and of course the software that comes with it is it. It's, you know, Windows software, maybe Mac, and it's funny because all the reviews and supposedly the instructions from the official website are to disable your antivirus because their software, you know, triggers the antivirus, which if you watch my channel or my main channel at all, you've heard me talk about how I think antivirus is a complete scam. You look at the history of it with McAfee and just think of the concept of antivirus, really think it through antivirus is a scam. I don't believe in it, but at the same time, if somebody says, and I'm not just saying that for Linux users, I mean that for anybody, but at the same time if someone says, here's a piece of software, be sure to disable your antivirus. Don't do it. But I watch a bunch of YouTube videos and be like, oh, you're just sitting, and they do it, and you're just fine if you're gonna have a dedicated machine just for this, but if you're using working machines, just like, man, don't do that. Anyway, look at this tiny little thing, it's great. I'm out in my garage because it's probably gonna produce a lot of smoke. You can engrave, you know, on wood, on paper, they have some cardboard here with a little test print they did. And this one is, I believe, a thousand watt laser. There were some models that were a little bit more money that were 1500 watts. But I just wanted the cheapest one possible. Anyway, going back to the software, so I looked up online and sure someone figured out how it works, and it's just a serial port connection. So you don't need any special software, although I did find a GitHub page with instructions and some bash code and Python code to do it, but I looked over the code, it's very, very simple. And in fact, just for fun, I might in the future see about just making an Arduino device that I plug in and print an image. It's kind of silly to have an Arduino device that just prints one image, but I could have an image maybe saved on an Arduino that I plug in, it sends serial commands. Because all it does is the code is it initializes serial connection, which you need permissions to do. I'm gonna be doing this on a Linux Mint Live USB, because that's just what I had in my pocket. So you either need to give yourself permission, and I think it's the, is it the dial-up group or modem group that you need to add yourself to and then log back in. Or in just case, I'm just gonna run a pseudo on this because it's just a test machine. But then it sends an initial little string to initialize it, and then you dump a bitmap to the serial port because you just cat it out. And it has to be monochrome, one bit. So not grayscale, it's black or white. So there's no shading to it unless you do like every other pixel, but black and white images. And I already made a bunch of examples. When I ordered this, I made a bunch, and I didn't flip them. I think you gotta flip it so the text isn't backwards if there's words. But it's very, very simple. So it's funny that you're supposed to install the software that they tell you to disable antivirus, but all of this is simple serial connection. So you don't need any drivers. Theoretically, I could hook this up to a Windows 95 machine and send serial commands to it and print to it. You don't need any special software. That's great. There's a lot of printers that are like that. Like a lot of thermal printers are like that. You just connect at the right connection speed and you dump text to it and it prints. And that's funny because years ago I was talking to a guy who works with Windows computers and he's like, oh, I can't use links. You know, I have clients that have these registers and I wanna make sure that it has proper drivers. Like a register, that's just gonna be a thermal printer. You don't need drivers. You just dump the text to it, you know? But whatever. So, theoretically, this should be pretty simple. Again, very small area. I will show you here in a moment. Let me bring it over here and show you what's in the package. Again, I'm very excited, very tired. Haven't showered yet today. Come here. So again, here is the printer. Here's a little example print that they printed on this. So, let's see. Turn on, off, automatic focus and focus. So, they did this on a little piece of cardboard, which is great. And you can adjust the intensity, how much it burns. And I would think that if I used this regular piece of paper, it might be able to cut. It was called a cutter, laser engraver cutter. You're not gonna cut through wood, maybe if you went multiple times over the same path. But I'm wondering if I can cut designs out on paper. Let's go over here to the box. Focus. There we go. That looks focused, maybe. There. So, it powers through USB and communicates through USB. Looks like they gave me some pieces of wood to test on, that's good. This looks like some sort of cleaner, maybe to clean the head of the laser. It will adjust your knob, because you can adjust the height of the laser, because if you put a block in there, like this one's thicker than that, you can adjust out, I think you wanna get a fine point. Just from watching YouTube videos, special safety glasses. Here's a CD with the software, a lot of the reviews. You didn't get a CD, they sent them with a little SD card. I was like, oh cool, I get a free SD card, but I guess not, I got this, but again, this is, maybe I'll use this CD case for something. There's the other side, here is the manual. I'm gonna glance over this real quick. Okay, yeah, I glanced over the paperwork, I'm too, I don't wanna read it all. But I glanced it enough, it didn't seem like there was anything important. Point out that on the back, there are buttons up, down, left, right, and I think those are to adjust where the laser is to where it starts. I'm gonna jump in and start trying to print stuff. Now there's rubber bands on the plate, here. Oh, there's more foam packaging down here, I didn't see, let's see, there we go. So there's little rubber bands on here, and you have to rubber band or tape, watching a few YouTube videos, people's first mistake is placing the piece of wood on there and not securing it down. The platform doesn't move, only the laser, but the thing shakes, I guess, while it's printing, and your print will come out all wrong, wood will move. So you gotta rubber band down or tape it down. And another thing that people did was they didn't start at the top left corner, so they'd get halfway through the print, and I'll say I'm just gonna be printing a line because it's at its limits. But I'm gonna go ahead and hook up these USB connections here and just try to send something. Now there's a red button on the top here, I don't know if that's an emergency stop, or I did read in the manual that there is a, oh, here's, oh, this is a little grippy, sticky thing. But that's the whole, I'm gonna put that on until after I do a few prints, we'll see. But as I was saying, the red button, I don't know if that's an emergency stop, oh, more foam. Man, they really packed this thing in good. Don't wanna set anything on fire. Okay, but yeah, I'm gonna just try dumping a picture to it. Now, you need five volts, one amp to power it, which is through this USB cable, it doesn't come with a power block. I have power blocks if I need to plug this into a wall unit, but I'm hoping that this laptop puts out enough power. If I have any problems, I'll be sure to try switching that over. But right now I'm gonna power it off the laptop. This in, I don't know if I should have my glasses on. Oh, the platform does move on the bottom. I didn't think it did, from people talking on YouTube videos. So both the laser head and the platform, I can see where the laser is pointing. I don't know if it just centered itself up or not. Let me get these glasses out. Oh, super cool, everything's like a dark green color. Okay, let's see, list, device, is it gonna be USB or TT, oops, TTY USB zero, that should be it. So let me move in. And I might do a little more in depth. Right now this is just me trying this out. Here is the, do these adjust out longer? They're short, they don't even go over my ears when they're on my head. I'll put it back on in a minute. So, the batch script. So I gotta give it, run the script, give it the serial device, the image name, and burn time. And I don't know the values for the burn time. Let me read the readme file, vim, readme. Of course, vim's not installed, vim-tiny, vim-tiny not found. Why is it, I guess nano, or just cat, I'll just less readme. Also another thing is in the blog that the guy who wrote the script, he said images have to be 512 by 512 resolution. But then in the readme on the page and in the source code it says 520 by 520. So I did all my images 520 by 520. We'll see, there might be different models that have different resolutions. Let's see, I'm at the end of the file already with less. I'm just looking, I don't know what value to give for burn time. I wanna say that in the software that comes with it, it's between one and 20. So I'll just go 10 and see, I'm sure if it's an invalid number, it will tell me, maybe. It also said that if you're just burning on a flat piece of wood, you don't need to adjust the laser because it's already focused to a flat piece. But if you're doing anything thicker, you wanna adjust the laser so it's a thin point. Let me get these glasses on now. That is a bright laser. It's not even really on yet. So let's see, script. And then what was it, script, serial device, dev, usb, no, tty, usb-zero, image, examples. And I am just going to do a punisher skull that I need time, like I said, 10. Probably, let's see if that runs or if I have to do pseudo first. Yeah, it just must be 520 by 520. Let me unplug this for a moment. I don't feel safe. That is a bright laser. It's not even going. Okay, I was just about to give up on this. I've been out here about an hour and 15 minutes. So I tried the original script. It seemed to be working. It was dumping the image file to it and the laser would move around but wouldn't actually burn anything or just move around a bit. I tried adjusting the script. I tried different resolutions. I popped in the CD it came with and it had files with two different resolutions on them. And it's like sending signals and the printer was doing stuff, the engraver was doing stuff but it wasn't actually burning anything. I kept pressing the red button up here. It would burn the little test pattern but not the image I was uploading it to. So I kept on looking at different codes and they were all the same thing. I was thinking maybe the log rate's wrong. It's maybe it's a different, whatever. Finally, I found an ARC on Hackaday which is always a good site to go to to a link on GitHub, a program called Easy Engraver which works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It's open source. And I plugged that in. I tried putting that and it has stuff to adjust it. It has a GUI and a command line. I haven't tried the command line yet. And it wasn't working. I was just about to give up. And I realized there was a drop down button, a drop down menu. And it was at the version one. Tried version two didn't work. Tried version three. And I believe it's burning my image finally. So let's go ahead and have a look at that. So I think I finished with the tire just as this finished. So yeah, we got a little cardboard Punisher Skull there. So I'm gonna play around with this. I'll probably do a video maybe in the future on the software, but I thought I'd share because I'm excited. I got a laser engraver. I've wanted one of these for years. Thanks for watching. Please visit Filmsbychrist.com. That's Chris the K. I hope you enjoyed this. Have a great day. Wait, wait, wait, I forgot. While I was trying to get this out, I got another package in the mail and there should be things to go along with this. What have we got here? So what these are, little pieces of wood. It's very cheap. These are little like gift tags. Let's see. Man, you will focus. These are like gift tags that I can burn on too. There we go. And these are like little round coins that I can burn on too. So I'll give that a try. So there's our last burn and this coin. I mean, if I was gonna print that skull, I'd probably wanna shrink it down just a little bit. But I got another image I'm gonna put on there. And I'm gonna try using this little rubber mat that it came with. See if that holds it in place because obviously I can't use the rubber bands and it'd be difficult to use tape on that little, that sticks really good. I think is I need to line this up properly. But if I, in the software, if I click home, oh, it would help if I plug the power back in. And if I'm gonna do that, I want my safety glasses. There they are. Okay. Oh, it's getting dark. I can't really see anything with these glasses on. Let me try connecting failed. Okay, so, because I was already connected, I probably have to close out the software here, reopen it, choose it, connect successful home. Looks like it might already be at home. Line that up. Let's give this a try.