AtomStack A5 Laser Cutter and Engraver Review!

Hey folks, TechNibbers here. Today we are going to be taking a look at this beast. This is the Atomstack A5 laser cutter and engraver and it works on all sorts of things. I have here a little piece of acrylic. This was one of my first tests and as you can see it didn't end up perfect but it does cut into this very nicely and if I turn the power up just a little bit I think I would have gotten a very very nice engraving similar to the one that I got from the wood here. Now this can also be used to cut thin pieces of wood and we'll be looking at that later here and I also did a mirror. Now unfortunately I had a connection problem when the mirror was this close to being finished and as you can see it did not complete but it came out pretty nice nonetheless. I wish it finished because this was going to be a gift but we'll have to start over on that. I am however very very pleased with the power and ease of use of this laser. We'll jump right into that right now so stay tuned. Technivorous channel is brought to you by these fine patreon supporters. Check us out on patreon at patreon.com slash technivorous. So far I am super impressed with this machine. I am happy with the results I've been getting and I just want to take a quick look at it right here right now real quickly and show you one of the reasons I find this machine so exciting. So not only does it have the guard there that will protect your eyes, this is a fixed focus laser meaning that you use these two nuts here to adjust it up and down and the idea is to get it two millimeters away from the object that you're trying to engrave. Now how do you get it exactly two millimeters? Well that's pretty simple. You slide the object underneath it and then you take this handy dandy two millimeter acrylic plate here and you basically just slide it under there and that will put you at the proper distance to burn from the item that you're engraving and then you just tighten the nuts but the bolts back down. So I've had printers before that were kind of a hassle because you had to focus them in yourself which meant turning on the focus power for the laser and staring at it with your glasses on and getting it dialed just in just right depending on how far away you are from an object. This is a lot more foolproof and super duper simple. I haven't had any problems using it so far and I've engraved on multiple materials as you'll see. So now we just slide this piece out and we are pretty much ready to go. I'm going to take a quick step through the software process and show you how you can center this and also move it to the corner using the software and get yourself kind of lined up exactly where you want and make sure everything is square. So go ahead and push this over to the corner here. Software we're going to be using with this laser engraver is laser durable. It's pretty simple. Once you have it connected you're basically going to click on the com port it's connected to and in my case it's com4 and if you don't see it you're going to go ahead and install this ch340 driver. Mine's already installed so I'm going to click com4 hit connect and here you can see it connected no problem. So next we need to open a file. I'm going to go ahead and grab my technivorous logo. We'll do this one here. Open that up and then you have some settings. Now you can adjust your contrast your white clip your brightness things like that. For the most part these settings I don't mess with too much. I do have the direction sent set to horizontal. Now this laser is a little bit finer on the vertical so if you want to do something with great detail set it to vertical. It just it will take a little bit longer because those are going to be thinner lines. So I have it set to eight for quality. We're going to leave it set to horizontal in this case because the picture is much longer than it is wide and there's not a ton of detail. But let's see okay there we go horizontal and then you can see here we have options for the laser power. Now depending on what you're cutting in my case it's going to be wood this time. I'm going to leave that around 280 and get a nice engraving. If I wanted to cut it I'd turn it up to about 300 and you can also alter the number of passes so it'll trace around something as many times as you want and that will get you a cut without cutting through too much material and burning burning it all at one time. So you can see here I can center the laser as I spoke about a minute ago by clicking here and there are a couple other options for finding the best way to orient whatever you're burning the logo onto before actually starting printing. So one of them is to use this which is going to outline or frame as it says here on the little icon the actual print that you're making. So in the physical world the laser is now using is shining the light and traveling around the area it's going to be printing within and that'll help you center your object and get it exactly where you need it. It is a short hop skip and a jump from there to start the printing printing process. Once you're all dialed in all you're going to do to get it to engrave is go ahead and hit the play button that says run program up here on the top left and when you do that you'll see it start executing machine code commands on the panel here that lists everything that's going through the input output. So now let's check out some of the things that I've blasted with this magnificent machine. Now this engraver right out of the box did come with a few sample pieces of wood and a piece of sample acrylic as well as a couple other little items that come in handy when working with a laser such as a brush and the glasses you're going to need to prevent yourself from going blind when the laser is working. And I went out and found immediately a bunch of cheap stuff that I could laser on from wood that you see here to mirrors and little placards and things like that and I've really really had good success with pretty much everything I've tried. You'll see a little bit later in the video why I shouldn't really be given a laser and we'll jump into that when the time comes but as you can see here we're going to go through a quick little time lapse and show you this guy just blasting away on this wood. It's a nice sign I made with a cassette tape for my wife to put up on her wall of music in the living room here so there was a lot of lot of smoke when burning the wood and of course whenever you're engraving something else you do get a little bit of a smell so I highly suggest wearing some sort of mask or filtration piece as well. Now this engraver right out of the box did come with a few sample pieces of wood and a piece of sample acrylic as well as a couple other little items that come in handy when working with a laser such as a brush and the glasses you're going to need to prevent yourself from going blind when the laser is working. And I went out and found immediately a bunch of cheap stuff that I could laser on from wood that you see here to mirrors and little placards and things like that and I've really really had good success with pretty much everything I've tried. You'll see a little bit later in the video why I shouldn't really be given a laser and we'll jump into that when the time comes but as you can see here we're going to go through a quick little time lapse and show you this guy just blasting away on this wood it's a nice sign I made with a cassette tape for my wife to put up on her wall of music in the living room here so there was a lot of lot of smoke when burning the wood and of course whenever you're engraving something else you do get a little bit of a smell so I highly suggest wearing some sort of mask or filtration piece as well. That's going to be it for this video guys as I said this is the Atomstack A5 I will put a link to it down below in the description you can get it from banggood for about 250 bucks and it is definitely worth the investment just from the versatility of the things I've been able to utilize it for so far so I definitely recommend if you're looking into getting a laser engraver checking out this one I will say I've had a couple of cheaper versions that did not work out so well and I definitely like the fixed focus factor here this the fact that you can just slide a piece underneath adjust it to the exact perfect distance to engrave whatever you're trying to engrave for me is a big big time saver and I don't have to fiddle with all the focusing and all of that stuff another thing that I really like about this machine was its plug and play ability with the gerbil software I mean it was immediate I didn't have to mess around with it too much I did have to install that driver as I said but that was about it so that is amazing to just have it plugged right in connected and ready to go I was engraving probably within my first 10 minutes of having the machine all put together so I'm going to do more with this in future videos so look forward to seeing it around and for now that's going to be it we'll see in the next one guys techniverse out that's going to be it for this video guys pay no attention to the mess going on behind me pay more attention to the mess going on on my shirt check this out finally got the merch available that's right finally hit 10k so the merch is finally here make sure you check out the teespring merchandise bar below the video and thanks for watching don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe because we have more videos coming your way in fact I've thrown a couple of suggestions videos for you to watch on the screen right now so go ahead and check those out when you get done don't forget to pop over and check out the merchandise there's plenty of stuff to see and thanks for watching guys