 Today we're taking a dive into lasers and I'm going to show you how to get a magic number from a tile like this and take the magic number from that tile and make something awesome like this. This is a great way to make money with your cheap desktop diode lasers. My name's Jim and this is The Edge of Tech. So like I said, we're talking lasers today. We're actually going to be using cheap white ceramic tile that you can get at any hardware store. This stuff is super cheap and it makes some awesome projects. Then I'm going to teach you how to do this and this gives you a pattern on that tile and it's all based on your burn percentage. Then in the end we'll take the percentage that we like the most and we'll burn a tile and hopefully we get the colors we want. The cool thing is you can actually do this for every color you have and when you do that for every new color, you'll have a whole bunch of tiles and you'll be able to tell exactly what color you want to choose when you burn that tile on your laser. The really cool thing is it's kind of like a benchy. A lot of my videos are based around 3D printing and we print like a benchy or a test cube or some sort of test on our 3D printers to dial it in and look at the settings we want to use going forward. So you can consider this your benchy for color tiles. There's a couple things that you need to know to do before we get going. Number one, you need to focus your laser. Grab a tile, put it underneath your laser and get it focused in very nicely before we go any further because your laser needs to be focused in. I will have videos coming up on how to do that but for this video, make sure you focus your laser very well. Number two, in the video you'll see me wearing gloves. That is my choice. I prefer to wear gloves when I'm around the acetone and the pain thinners and stuff like that. My hands dry out and I just don't like it. I'm not saying that everybody has to but safety first. Read the directions on the cans, read the directions on your spray paint and make sure you protect yourself. And I prefer gloves when I'm cleaning my tiles off. Number three, you're going to need a program called GIMP installed and you're also going to need Lightburn installed. I love Lightburn. It has a ton of features. It's a very advanced program for our lasers and there is a free 30 day trial and all the links will be in the description below for everything you need. So make sure you get those things done before you go any further but we're going to rock and roll. I think it's time we should dive in. Let's do a step by step instructional on how to make these sweet color tiles and in the end you're going to be burning awesome stuff that you can sell to your friends and your family and make money to pay for that laser. Let's do it. So I got my gloves on and I'm going to take a microfiber. I got these at Costco. This is actually a brand new one and some lacquer thinner and we want to make sure we clean our tiles very thoroughly. So they come with a waxy residue on them and a lot of the issues we see on the forums is that people did not clean their tiles off good enough. So make sure you do a really good clean job. Make sure your tiles clean even on the corners and I always go down the edges and just make sure everything is cleaned off so you have a nice shiny clean tile. Something to point out you can use a lacquer thinner or an acetone to do this. Those are the best things. In my opinion there might be other things out there that work very well to get the stuff off the tiles but these are the two that I use. Lacquer thinner or acetone. Now that the tile is clean and dry it's time to add some paint. I'm going to use the Rustoleum Painters Touch Ultra Cover Paint Plus Primer. This is the 2X can. This is just what I found in the hardware store so you guys can use what works for you. This particular one is Apple Red and it is a gloss. You take off the cap so make sure you shake this up very well and I have already done that. Then when you paint you want to spray a little out here and make sure you're not splotching and you want to start out here and come across nice and even. I do one coat that way and then I do a quick coat this way and that's all I do and as you can see everything gets coated nicely so I do one coat this way, one coat this way and then I let this dry for about 30 minutes to an hour. Just make sure it's dry before you put your top coat on. While that's drying I'm going to do a second tile because we want to test tile. So I'm going to do the same thing, a quick coat across the front there and then come back across this way. Make sure everything is good and coated so you see the red there. It's very important that you paint the same way every single time because one of these tiles is going to be used for a test as you'll see shortly but if we don't paint the same way every single time our tests really won't mean much. So what you're going to do is make sure you paint the exact same way as best as you can every single time. Now that the red is dry we need to put our black top on so make sure you purge your paint a little bit, do the same thing, I just do one coat that way quick and then one quick coat that way and again as long as you do it the same way every single time you're going to be okay. Now let this dry for 24 hours and then we'll go to our laser. Now what you want to do is go to the link in the description below and you want to get the color test 1200 final and right click and download that file. Then you want to open Lightburn. Lightburn is not the free software, it's a software that you have to pay for but it's very powerful and it works very well. Now that Lightburn is open, click right here and it'll give you an open project area. So you'll go to downloads and find the download that we did which is the color test. If we use the scroll wheel and we zoom in a little bit you can see what I did. Everything here is percentages so this is 8%, 9%, 10%, 11%, all the way up to 20%. Then we jump to 30% and 40%. These are all the percentages in which the laser is going to come on at. In this case we're going to use 1200mm a minute. In the end it'll give us a test tile so we can see exactly how far down in the paint that each one of these percentages burn. On the right side you can see all of the different layers and they correlate with all the colors here. So if you wanted to change this and you wanted to do a different percentage or maybe do a different speed you could actually go through and open it by double clicking it and then you could go right here, here's your speed. So you could set this at 1300 or 900, whatever you need to do and then along the left side here you can actually just go through each layer and you want to change each one to match. If you change the speed to 1300 and you want the whole tile to be 1300 just make sure you change them all. In this case we're going to keep it at 1200 because I've had really good success with 1200mm a minute. They are set to fill and then do a line which is awesome. It's actually going to go in order of each of these layers so each one of these is a layer. Once you have it set here in light burn we are going to get it ready on our laser and we're going to get this burning. Now what we have is the file open in light burn. We have our tile that's been painted and sitting for 24 hours. What we need to do now is position our tile on the bed and we need to get this test burning. So what we're going to do is hit this little button right here and this sets the laser position by clicking on the page. Then I'm going to click on the little green dot. Once I click on the little green dot that will send the laser to that point in the bed and it doesn't matter where your laser is it's probably already homed but it'll send it to anywhere on the bed that you click when you have this little button selected. So you can go over here, you can go over here, it's all going to be okay but what we want to do is click the green dot right there. So now what we need to do is show the laser on our surface and move our tile to where it needs to be. Go to the move tab and there should be a little fire button right here. Well it's not there right now so if you don't have that button what you need to do is go to edit, go to device settings and you need to enable the laser fire button right here. See how it's green? You need to make sure that is green. If that is not green it looks like one of these, go ahead and click it so it is green just like that. The other issue I have is for some reason the resolution on my screen is not allowing me to see everything. So what I do is I have to move it kind of out of full screen mode to see the rest of the buttons and I'm not sure why I have to do that. I will research that but as we go forward I'm going to put it like this so you guys can see. So as you can see now we have this fire button right here and you're going to use this when you focus as well but we're not going to do that in this video. What you want to do is hit that fire button and it will actually show the dot where it is on the build surface. As you can see it's right above my finger here. So what we need to do is take and move our tile up so it's just in the corner just like that. Now my dot is right up in this corner and it's only at 1% so we're going to hit that fire button again to turn off the dot. What we need to do next is see where this is actually going to burn on the tile. So there's a frame button right here. I'm going to hold shift and hit that button and what that is going to do is turn your laser on and it's actually going to show you exactly where it's going to be on that tile. Hit shift, hit that frame button and watch. And from here you can kind of center your tile. I know it has to come down a little bit and you can kind of center it to where exactly you want it on your tile. So I'm going to actually bring it down like right there. We're going to try again. And so we could say that's pretty good. Make sure you have your safety glasses on and hit start. And what that will do, we'll start the burn. Now that our test is done, you can see exactly what it did. It started with the 8%. It went up to 20% and then jumped to 30% and 40% here. In order to get the most accurate colors, what we need to do is do this very gently, but we need to wipe it with a microfiber. So I'm just going to come through here, give it a nice wipe and maybe go both ways, but do it very gently. And you want to do that on all your prints when you're done, especially if you're going to clear coat them. The reason is if you're going to clear coat them and you don't wipe them, the paint will actually react with a clear coat. And we don't want that to happen. Now you can see all the colors. And these are really dark still. Now if you really wanted a dark red, maybe one that just is barely getting into the reds, it's really dark, you could go for here. If you wanted something a lot lighter, you could be up in this area. If you wanted to start getting lighter red and maybe some pinks, you could go here. And the cool thing about this is you can do this with every single color you use and do one tile like this. And this is now your color swatch, just like when you're going to paint your house, if you see a whole bunch of colors, you can hold them up to your wall and determine what color you want. This will actually work on all the tiles for all the colors and you can determine what color you want to burn with with what percent is the max. So here's an example of what I'm talking about. We have a red, an orange, a green, and this tile is actually just black over the white tile. So you can do this test on any color tile you want and that'll give you a color swatch for every single one, which is really cool because now I can see maybe I want grays in this black tile. Maybe I just want some grays or dark grays or in this green one, maybe I want a lighter green or a darker green. So this will actually give you a really cool way to look at all the different burn options for your tiles when you're doing color tile. Now what we wanna do is find an image to burn. In this case, I think I'll do a shine down logo. So click on images and you can see there's this one right here. That's a pretty sweet image. So I'm gonna actually right click it. Let's do save image as. We're gonna do shine down logo. So save your picture, whatever it is. Then you wanna open a program called GIMP and what GIMP is is a image manipulation tool and we're gonna use GIMP to basically turn this into a pretty sweet file for burning our tiles. So I go to open and I find the picture I just saved and I open it and that's this shine down logo right here. So what I need to do now is save this in the correct size for my tile. So I'm gonna click on image. I'm gonna go down here to a scale image. We're gonna go to inches because my tile is four by four inches. So we're gonna do four by four. Now I wanna do 600 resolution. So when I do that, it's actually gonna change my image size. So go back up here, hit four again, hit four again and once you have four by four and then 600 resolution is what I use, I'm gonna hit the scale button and it is gonna blow itself up huge. So I hold control and I scroll back on the wheel on my mouse and you can see now we have a four by four shine down logo and that is pretty much ready. What I need to do now is get this ready to process and to do that, I'm actually gonna use the big GIMP in plugin. You can find this in the link below in the description. This is what Garrett over at 3D Print Farm uses. I really like this plugin. It's just, it's super easy to use when you're first getting into this and it helps you create some awesome tiles. So I'm gonna go ahead and open the big GIMP in plugin. It is tile, it is 600 DPI like we said and I'm gonna leave it at 100 by 100 because actually my tiles are just a hair bigger than four by four and this is gonna be fine. So I'm gonna hit okay, it's gonna scale, it's gonna invert, it's gonna do a whole bunch of magic in the background. When we're done, we actually get a file that looks like this and this right here is what we're actually gonna use to burn. Anything in the black is gonna be pretty much using the max percentage of our power on the laser. Anything in the outline back here is actually gonna be using less percentage and it's gonna like shade it in and if we actually scroll in, what this does is it takes this and turns it into newspaper print. So a whole bunch of dots everywhere and it gradually goes darker and lighter and that's how we're actually gonna get our burn. So if we back out, we get our picture here, all we're gonna do is go over, we're gonna do file, I'm gonna do export as. You wanna go to where you wanna export it as, I'll just do it to my desktop here. We wanna do select file type, JPEG because we wanna make sure this is saved as a JPEG. I'm going to type shine down logo and I'm gonna save it right to my desktop. Now it's gonna pop a little box up that asks us for quality. I'm gonna go to 100% because I wanna use full quality and then I'm gonna hit export right here. It doesn't take long and it is gone. Now you wanna go back into light burn and my burn is done on the test file. So what I'm gonna do is go up to the left corner and I'm gonna hit new, which is this button up here and that's gonna clear the slate. Then I'm gonna go here where the little arrow is. I'm gonna go import, then we're gonna go to the desktop and I'm gonna find shine down logo.jpeg and that's gonna bring up the shine down logo that we just did in the big Gimpen plugin in GIMP. You can move it anywhere you want and if I zoom in, you can see it's ready to be burned. Anything in black is gonna use just about or full power on the laser. Anything else is actually gonna feather out and use a little bit less power to give us that blending. This is gonna be really cool because how this is gonna work when we burn our tile is we're gonna select the color that we want this middle to be and then the outsides will actually be a different shade. In our case, I'm gonna use the black and red tile that we painted. So in the center, it's actually gonna look a lot lighter in the S and the shine down here. Hopefully the bird will be a perfect shade of red and blends of red and it'll look really cool when we're done. So this is where we need to go look at our test tile that just finished and determine what percentage we wanna use on this burn. In my case, I want the S to be pretty white and I want the rest of it to kind of fade in. We can use 30 here, which looks like it got all the way through to the white. 40 actually looks like it overburned the tile. You wanna be careful, you don't wanna overburn your tile, that's not good. You could do a little bit lighter and just do two colors in the red, but I think I'm gonna try 30 for this tile and see how it turns out. I'm really hoping it'll do 30 and maybe one of these other colors out here for the rest, for the shading around it. So now that we looked at the tile, we can check out our image here. If we go to our Cuts tab, we can see that it's an image. In this case, we did the tiles already at 1200 millimeters a minute and they want the max power here at 15. Well, when we looked at our tile, I really wanted that dark area, the shine down and the S burned into almost white, like all the way through the paint. And I wanted this outside area, hopefully to be more of a red. Anything that's not in there will just be black and you can see that by there's no color around it. So in our case, because I want this to be white and burned all the way through the tile, I'm gonna use 30% because that's what we chose on our tile. Now, if you just wanted it to be red in here and maybe one of these to be like a darker charred red or something, you could easily dial this all the way back and probably use a 15% or something or whatever percent works for you. Use the percentage that you like. I'm gonna use 30. I'm gonna come down here and I'm gonna enable pass through because we already did everything in the big Gimpen plugin. I want to enable pass through because it's just gonna do dot for dot here. A little recap, we have 1200 speed millimeters a minute in my case because we're using a diode laser. We're gonna do max power at 30 and then I'm gonna hit enter to save all that. To make sure you save it, you can see it up here. It's an image 1200 at 30. Now all we have to do is use the method we did before to align our tile and make sure it's square and lined up. Hit start and let this thing fly and we're gonna do that now. The laser we're gonna be using in today's video is called an Ortur Laser Master II. This is the 20 watt version, which means the input of the laser is 20 watts. The output of the laser is more like four and a half to five and a half depending on what power it's running. You can find this in the description below but this is the laser we're gonna be using for this video and for some of the videos going forward. Now what we need to do is position our tile. So we're just gonna hit that fire button like we did before and we're only using 1% power and it's gonna show us the dot up in the corner. So mine's right there. Let's hold that shift key, hit the frame button like we did before and let's see how close we came. I would say that is dang close. I'm gonna leave it right there. Now our magic number was 30 because we really want that inside to be white. Assuming our magic number is 30 and our speed is 1200 like we talked about before. Everything is good to go and I'm gonna hit start. That'll go down and start the burn now. So you can see now we're getting there. We're maybe a third done and you can see where it really burned down where the shine down is there but you can still see some red in there too and that's kind of what I'm going for. We're about a little more than halfway done and as predicted, we are definitely burning further down in the shine down here in the S. That's exactly what we wanted using that magic number of 30. I really think this is gonna turn out awesome. As you can see it's burning deeper where it was completely black on that picture where the shine down here in the S is and then around it where it was shading, it's using a lighter power and it's really pulling out the red in that tile. I'm excited to see what this looks like in the end. I think it's gonna be pretty cool. Something else I wanted to show you is the importance of a good pair of safety glasses. So that is straight on at the laser right now. If you have a good pair of safety glasses, that's what this looks like here and you can really see how it blocks that blue light. This actually helps you see the laser be much better when you have a pair of these glasses and you can focus everything much better than the glasses that come with these Chinese kits. But this right here is a good way to show you what a good pair of safety glasses will look like when you look through there. If I take this away, you're gonna see all that blue light again like this. Okay, we're done. This is what it looks like when it's fresh done. Now what we're gonna do is take our fresh and clean microfiber right here and I'm gonna hold the tile and just give this thing a good wipe. I'm gonna go once that way. I'm gonna hold it and go this way. So now that the tile is wiped off with a microfiber, I did not press hard. It's just light pressure wiping it. I usually wipe it this way once and then this way once just to get everything out of there. You can see the desired effect really happened here. So we burned down to 30 down into the S and the shine down part here and then the rest actually gave us a really cool red right around the outside. The next thing we need to do is clear coat this. So let's go do that now. I always wanna paint in a well-ventilated area. In my case it's outside. I'm using the same type of paint except for this version is clear. Again, it's the Rust-Oleum Painters Touch and this is just a gloss on this one. The first thing to do is always make sure that your tile has been wiped off with that microfiber first and make sure it's wiped off really good. If you don't do that, the clear coat will actually eat the debris that is on the tile and I didn't know that. Then you end up with something like this where it actually ate all of the black here as you can see. It looks cool in the end but I did not mean to do that. We're gonna clear a little bit different. We wanna start with your clear and a very light coat for the first one. So I'm just gonna go through and give it a very light coat just like that. And I'm gonna let that dry. Since the sun is going down, I'm gonna let this dry for about a half hour before my next coat. The next coat can be a little thicker but this one needs to be very light just in case you don't get everything off then it won't react so bad but make sure you do a light coat just like I did. I just went once up the top make sure it's even if you can and we'll come back shortly. So it's been about a half an hour and I've let this dry for about a half an hour now and you can touch it and it's just barely tacky so it's not wet anymore. It would leave a fingerprint if I pushed down into it but because the sun went down it's not quite drying as fast as it usually does if I'm out here in the sun. I'm gonna do another coat. This one's gonna be a little bit thicker but I'm actually gonna come sideways. So that first one we went up. I'm gonna come sideways on this one and you can actually already see how those colors are starting to pop now with that clear coat especially with the gloss. So here we go. So that one was a little bit thicker. I went this way that time. I'm gonna do about two more coats. I'm gonna go up for my next one and maybe come across again for the fourth one and that'll be it on this tile but make sure you do three to four coats depending on how thick you want it. If you're gonna use this for a coaster you wanna go a little bit thicker because you wanna make sure it doesn't scratch so much when you're setting your drinks on it. I do four to six coats if it's a coaster. In this case for this video I'm gonna do four. So I'm gonna do two more and we'll be back. So I'm back inside and that's it. We're done. I've taken you start to finish on how to make this tile right here. Now something I did wrong on this tile and you'll see in the close up here in a second is that I did not follow my own directions and let the very first coat of clear coat the real thin one dry all the way before I put the second coat on. It caused a little bit of cracking right in the top as you can see. That's totally my fault but I tell you what with a little bit of patience and a little bit of practice you won't see that at all. As you can see in these pictures right here those are all great and they don't have any of that cracking. The test pattern we did only took about 17 minutes to do and I tell you what that's a lot quicker than a Benji on a 3D printer. So you could do this in 17 minutes for each new color tile. You could do one of these and have one for every color. All you have to do is look at the burn percentage you want, punch it in and hit that start button. If you have any questions about this technique throw them in the comments below. Do you already burn tiles? Do you have any advice for me? Toss those in the comments below too. I'd love to hear about it. I'd love hearing new ideas and I'm gonna be doing a lot more videos on this laser. We're gonna do some setup videos. We're gonna do some grid videos. So stay tuned for videos for the laser coming up. It's endless on what you can do. You can do any colors. You can do any picture. You can do pictures you've taken yourself which is so awesome. I've done a couple of those myself and your friends and your family are gonna love it. So once you get this rolling throw a bunch of them on Facebook. Throw a bunch of them on your social media. And I tell you what, the orders are gonna start coming. And this is a great way to make some money on the side using your cheap desktop laser. Just remember always use your magic number on your tile Benji and you'll be burning like a pro. Another cool thing you can do with these is you can actually go on Amazon and you can get cork. And this specific cork has adhesive on the back. And these are four by four inch pieces that fit right onto the back of the four by four tiles that we're doing. Now they stick on there. You can press them on. And now you can use these as coasters. They won't scratch your tables. They'll sit on that cork there. This is another great way to add value while you're making money using tiles like this. And all you're doing is adding a really cheap piece of cork with adhesive on the back straight to the back of the tile to make it a little more fancy. I hope you learned something today. And as always, keep burning. What's up everybody? I hope you loved the video. If you did, give me that thumbs up. Hit the subscribe button right here or the little bell right over here if you wanna get notified anytime Hot Makes Goes Live on Monday or we put another video out. Could it be a laser or 3D printing? I hope you guys liked the video and I hope you liked my dive into lasers. Did you see this one?