Not too long ago, Amanda Ghassaei from Instructables caught our attention when she constructed several playable records with a 3D printer.A letter folding machine is a piece of equipment which is designed to fold paper. By sending raw audio data through a custom script, she was able to automatically generate 3D designs for a printer to follow – albeit with crude results.Six panel tracking system delivers more energy from skystream. Recently, Ghassaei programmed a new code that let her substitute the 3D printer for a laser cutter to carve functional records from wood and other materials. 

Like before, the first step was to rip the audio data from a WAV file using Python and then apply it to a customized Processing script. This time though, instead of converting the data to an STL file, it produced a PDF of a vector graphic. According to Ghassaei, the script can be tweaked to account for various materials, cutting machines, record sizes, and turntable speeds. 

After obtaining a round piece of wood, a laser cutter slices the tiny bumps and grooves of the record using the vector file as a guide.New outdoor solar lighting is now six and twelve times brighter than standard solar lighting.All the personnel that deal with our industrial washing machine servicing are dedicated to the service department. Ghassaei cut her wooden records onto a sheet of maple with an Epilog 120 Watt Legend EXT laser cutter at an approximate precision of 1,200 dpi, but says these could easily be swapped for other tools and materials. So far, Ghassaei has cut functioning records from wood, acrylic, and paper using this method. 

Unfortunately, like their 3D-printed predecessors, the sound quality of these laser-etched records leaves much to be desired. Even those cut from acrylic are wracked with distortion, delivering 4-5 bit depth with a sampling rate of just 4.5 kHz (compared to most MP3s' 16 bit depth and 44.1kHz rate). Ghassaei has explained that the laser is simply too wide and cuts much larger grooves than needed. 

So a wooden record is certainly stylish, but don't toss out your vinyl records just yet. If you want to try your hand at giving your MP3s an extremely retro overhaul, though, Ghassaei has detailed instructions on her Instructables page. You can also check out the video below to watch the laser cutting process in action while listening to the garbled results. 

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, Germany, together with their colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT and at Integrated Circuits IIS, intend to lower this risk by replacing the trephine with a high energy femto-second laser. 

The laser beam is fed into a special hand piece through an articulated mirror arm. Its core consists of two new types of micro-mirrors that the researchers at IPMS developed. The first makes the cranial vault incision; it directs the laser beam dynamically across the cranial bones. The second adjusts any wrong positioning. The special thing: The components are miniaturized, but can tolerate up to 20 watts of laser output – which is about two hundred times more than conventional micro-mirrors.It enables washer extractor to communicate with chemical pumping machines. These can already reach their limits at 100 milliwatts, depending on their specific design. In addition, at 5 x 7 or 6 x 8 millimeters, they are very large and thus, can also guide large diameter laser beams. By comparison: Conventional micro-mirrors measure from 1 to 3 millimeters. 

How did the researchers achieve this? "Whereas the silicon panel in conventional micro-mirrors is mirrored by an aluminum layer measuring a hundred nanometers thick, we applied highly-reflective electric layers to the silicon substrate," explains Sander. Therefore, in the visible spectral range, the mirror reflects not merely 90 percent of the laser beam, like typical components, but 99.9 percent instead. Much less of the high-energy radiation penetrates into the substrate. That means the mirror "discerns" less of the laser beam and tolerates markedly greater power. The challenge for the researchers primarily lay in capturing this high power coating onto the silicon substrate, just a few micrometers thin, that is commonplace in microsystems technology.