 Manually focusing a diode laser. My name is Jim and this is The Edge of Tech. So I get a ton of questions about how I focus my diode laser. So I decided to make a quick video and show you how I do it. Now this is the way I manually do it. Sometimes I actually pull out a little USB microscope and that even gets me more dialed in. I'll do another video on that later on but first a very quick video on how to manually focus your diode laser. So what I want to do is open up lightburn, come on over to this icon right here which moves our laser head and click somewhere in the center and you'll see the laser actually move to the center. Then you want to take whatever you're gonna engrave on or cut and put it underneath that laser. So we're gonna go ahead and do that now. So in my case I want to work on a coaster so I'm gonna put a coaster right underneath it. I'm gonna take a black piece of paper and I'm gonna put that on top of the item that I'm going to be engraving or cutting just like this. The next thing you want to do is make sure that your focal length is correct from the bottom of your fan shroud to this item right here. In my case I'm using a G8 lens so between 70 and 75 millimeters is what I need from what I've read so that's where I'm at. I'm at about 72 right here and we're gonna leave it just like that. Now what I want to do is come over to lightburn. In lightburn I'm gonna go to the move tab and you should have this fire button right here. If you do not have that fire button you want to come to the top left, hit edit, go to device settings and click enable fire button right here. This needs to be green. If it's not, make it green, click okay. If you do that you'll have to close lightburn, reopen it and then you'll have this fire button right here. So I'm gonna use 5% so I can see it through my glasses on the camera. Now I do this manually this way. I also have a USB microscope that I plug in and that helps me dial it in much better. I'll put a link in the description below and then I'll do a video later on on how to do that. But in this case I'm going to hit the fire button. It's gonna be very bright on that camera but I'm gonna hit the fire button right now and that's gonna show the beam on that black piece of paper. Now with my safety glasses on of course we know that we want this beam as small and as tight as we possibly can get it. Currently on the camera it just looks like a big blob, but that's okay. So I'm gonna reach under and I'm gonna turn that beam and if you go too far one way it gets really fuzzy. If you come back real slow you'll actually see it and it'll get fuzzy that way so we're too far. So I'm gonna go back and you can see it it'll actually start burning the paper when it's correct. Now there's a lot of people that do this at a much lower power and you can definitely do it at a lower power. I just prefer the higher power when I'm showing you for the camera. I just went back and forth until I found a very tight beam and if I move this around I don't know if you can see that but it actually is engraving a circle. Then I'm gonna turn that beam off in light burn. I'm just gonna click the fire button to turn that beam off and you should be pretty darn good. Now you want to make sure you do this every time you burn and you want to make sure that it's very tight. So that's the circle I just made right here and you can see it's super tiny little lines there. Now I know I am dialed in. Now if you're gonna do something like the Norton white tile method or something like that you need to be super super dialed in. With that I would do some testing. There's some really good test files if you go to the different Facebook groups and you can download those and it'll go through the different lines and all that but you have to be very very focused. In showing you all that this should be good to go. We can actually burn on this coaster if we want to. In this case I don't need to burn that coaster so I'm not gonna but now we're good and we're focused. So there you go. We went through we put an item down. We made sure the distance the focal length was correct. We laid a dark piece of paper black or dark brown down. Then we turned on that fire button on the diode laser and we made sure that beam got as small as possible. Now you can actually see it much better than you did in that camera. It's very hard to show you that on the camera but when you're watching you can actually see the beam go go go and then if you get too much it'll actually get bigger again and that's what you don't want to happen. So watch that beam make sure it gets really tight and that should give you a very good focus. Now you can always grab a USB microscope. I'll put the link in the description below. They're very cheap. You can plug it straight into your computer then you turn your fire power all the way down to like 0.25 and you put that USB microscope on it and you see it on your screen and then you can really see that beam as tight as it can go. But in this case we just did a quick manual focusing that should help you guys get up and going. I hope you guys learned something today. Keep burning.