![]() I haven’t had it long enough to do what I’d call a “review” with things like laser cutters with their myriad moving parts and… you know, lasers, new issues can pop up months after you open the box, as components wear and maintenance is required. Production is already underway, and units are already rolling off the line.įlux sent me one of those early units to check out for a few weeks. In the case of beamo, it seems like the Kickstarter is primarily meant to help get the word out, rather than literally “kickstarting” the process. While I tend to be a bit hesitant when it comes to crowdfunded hardware (having been burned too many times by products that either never arrived or did arrive only to be total garbage), Flux has been down this road before in addition to Delta, it also crowdfunded and shipped Beambox (a slightly bigger, pricier, but more powerful laser cutter) just a few months back. Shipping/taxes aren’t included in those prices, and can cost a couple hundred bucks, so factor that in to any purchasing decisions. The early-bird models are going for $849, with the company pinning the final MSRP at $1,500. They sprinted past their goal of $25,000 pretty quickly, currently sitting at roughly $350,000 raised with a little over a week to go. One of the latest entries into this space is beamo, a compact, 30W laser cutter and engraver built by Flux - a Taiwan-based team you might remember for raising $1.6 million on Kickstarter with its Flux Delta 3D printer/scanner/engraver back in 2014.Īs with Delta, Flux is turning to Kickstarter for the launch of beamo. They’ve gotten affordable enough, and small enough, that a DIY home hobbyist can add it to their toolset without taking out a second mortgage or needing much more than some desk space… but they’re still a rare enough machine that saying “I’ve got a laser cutter!” makes people look at you like you’re a friggin’ wizard. Gone are the days when the cheapest machines were tens of thousands of dollars, and when the “compact” models were roughly the size of a freezer. I like the Beamo! I'm hacking around it to push a "entry level" device to the limits! Read my review about it.Laser cutters are in a fun place right now. ![]() G-code generated by LightBurn and LaserWeb4 can be parsed by this tool as well (but not all G-code is supported). This allows you to edit the F-code directly and also have a preview to know if you screwed up. It also generates visual previews of all cuts and engraving moves. The G-code cannot be run on other machines because there's some proprietary modifications to GRBL that allows FLUX to send bitmap images much faster than usual.įcode4humans.htm Converts F-code binary instructions to a human-readable version (that looks like G-code), and also vice-versa. ![]() I have written two tools here that can work with the FLUX-Task files:įcode2gcode.htm Converts F-code to G-code, useful for importing into simulation. The code is outdated, more recent firmware updates do not include source code anymore, but the old code remains. ![]() If you want to dig for it yourself, look for "fcode_executor.py", "device_fsm.cpp", "misc.py", and "test_fsm.py". But the microSD card on the Pi had some source code on it that I could read to figure out the fc file format. The fc file format is proprietary and doesn't look like the G-code that a GRBL laser control circuit would understand. The Beam Studio software generates ".fc" files and sends it over to the Pi for each job. The FLUX Beamo is a laser cutter/engraver that uses a Raspberry Pi as half of its brain.
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