MakerBot Industries

Awesome! This is the first thing I thought of when I saw it:

That's really cool!!

Now if I only had a stronger laser…

Well, it looks like they do have an optional Lens Focuser.. Specs on the laser you linked to say it's a 5mm beam. From the picture of the focuser, it looks like you could get it down to 1.0mm without too much trouble.

Worst case, you could make a 2D design, extrude it up in Z to make it a 3D design, export it to an STL file then feed that to skeinforge. You'd need to post-process the file to get it flipped over - layers go down instead of up - but that wouldn't be too hard..

Thanks for the offer :)
The laser uses standard 18650 lipos (18mm diameter, 65mm lenght), so that wouldn't be to hard to make. But the actual problem is the lasers safety-system: It is designed for handheld-use and contains a microchip that needs a code to be entered every single time the laser is powered on. So one would have to take the hole thing apart and directly connect the diode to an arduino board. I think it's easyier to just get a decent laser-diode from ebay or somewhere and use that ;)

Yep, maybe we can build a paper-makerbot now :D

quoted textIs this BluRay-style laser the one you'd suggest to get for someone looking to play with projects like this? Or did you just pick this one because it looks really cool.

Yeah, that's really just because of the high geek-factor ;) And it's the only laser I have that's strong enough. If you want your own true lightsaber then go for it (and make tbuser's tron-poster reality). If you however really want to cut things I strongly suggest to go for a infrared laser. They are a lot better as infrared is absorbed much better (White or blue paper is a lot harder to cut than red or black one with a blue laser. However, infrared is invisible and as such even more dangerous). The other thing is the form-factor: To connect it to some electronics a simple diode is handier.

Sadly, I can only confirm these reports (took them 4 months to delliver). They got shlashdotted, one could say (http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/14/1716209/Set-Free-Your-Inner-Jedi-Or-Pyro). WickedLasers offered a blue 1W handheld laser for 200$. (They raised it to 300$ by now) To put this in perspective: A few years ago, a 0.2W laserpointer did cost >1000$! And blue ones where just unheard of.

So, wickedlaser is a bit overwhelmed and the delay is somewhat understandable. They also dediced to include a lot more safte-features as this thing really is dangerous.