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Fun with a laser cutter part 1 (Base for a relay board)

Theo Kleijn has his laser cutter setup and it was time to make something useful.
Theo's blog : http://pa0kn.nl/#home

I took a board I had laying around, a 16 relay board, similar to one found here : http://www.ebay.com/itm/16-Channel-12V-Relay-Module-Coupling-Optocoupler-High-Trigger-For-MCU-Arduino-/221358546298 and http://www.miniinthebox.com/16-channel-12v-relay-module-board-w-power-lm2576-optocoupler-protection_p903439.html



And decided to make a nice base for it, so it was not directly on the table.

I started by designing the base plate, I measured the board and made a drawing in LibreCad, which was in the Ubuntu repository.
This was not a success, when trying to save the file the program segfaulted and all my work was lost.
I already had a license for QCAD 2.2 (on which LibreCad is based) and have used it without problems on my old linux machines (in 2008 and later).
The old version I had was alright, many productive shortcut-keys etc, but many improvements were made since that time (the version is now 3.4.6) so I went to the website http://www.ribbonsoft.com/shop/ and purchased another license, for only 32 Euro, which is very low price for such a good program. (Thanks Andrew)

I drew the the board outline and mounting holes.
I then offset some extra space to make the outline for the base.


First I make a sketch on paper



Made a precise drawing in QCAD
I exported it to DXF and loaded the file into LaserMate (a windows program that came with the laser cutter) where we cut the part.


We also made some nice plexiglass spacers and added some text in 'scan mode'

This is the result.









Next will be a full box with cut-outs. We just need to design one.

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