The Artilume T1 Laser Engraver - Too Good To Be True?

Let's test out the new Ardeloom T1 laser engraver on this bonus episode of Toy Train Tips and Tricks. And hello again, this is Mike with a special episode of Toy Train Tips and Tricks. We're stepping away from the layout for a bit, and we're stepping over to the workbench, what I call my creation station, and we're going to look at some of the tools that I use to do the projects on the layout. And specifically, this new tool that was sent to me this week. Now, they say that great things come in small packages, and that is certainly the case with this relatively small box. This little box contains a laser engraver, and not just a teeny tiny laser engraver, but one that you can actually do some decent-sized projects with. This is the new Ardeloom T1, and full disclosure, the folks at Ardeloom sent this to me in exchange for the videos. However, I do maintain 100% editorial control. The opinions you're going to hear about this little device are totally mine. And those of you who have been with the channel for a while know that I have several laser engravers of various types and sizes, and I do use them frequently for projects on the layout. But what I find is my go-to engraver for big projects, and I do use it a lot, but I don't use it every day. And on the days when I'm not using it, it sits on the workbench and uses a lot of very precious real estate on the workbench that could be used for other projects. So what if there was a laser engraver that was portable enough that you could just take it off the workbench, hold it up, and put it away somewhere until you needed it the next time? But it was still a quality machine and big enough to do most engraving projects. Well, that mix, that best of both worlds, is what we have here with the Ardeloom T1. So Ardeloom developed the T1 with the specific market of craft show vendors in mind. They wanted to make the quality engraver that you could take with you and do projects for the crowd while they waited. However, what I find even more useful is, like I said, that this is for the occasional engraver. Not someone who's using it every day at an industrial scale, but someone who has the occasional project that they want to do, and they don't want to have a big bulky engraver sitting on their workbench 24-7 when they might use it once a week, once a month, a couple times a year. This is the solution. So let's get on with it! Alright, so let's open up the box for this little laser engraver. Yes, I already cheated and cut the tape. It's all wrapped in plastic. Here we go! We have, obviously, our instructions. We have some samples of products there. Some wood, some cardstock. Alright, and this looks like it is very well encased in foam. Open it up. Oh yes, there we are. Now here is the main body of the engraver. And again, you see how small this is. And when you are ready to use it, open the legs, and you can see here there's our power button. Here's our USB port, and here is the adapter, power adapter. Goes right there. Set it down. Make sure this is loose, and pull out our X-axis. Tighten down the screw. It's good and solid now. These clip in place. These are little spring-loaded, so that keeps that. Then, oh, here we go! We have our laser module. And again, this is modular. These come in different wattages. This one, I believe, is 7 watts, which is right in the middle of what they offer. And you see these rails here slide right here into our spot. And you'll want to tighten that screw. That keeps it from falling. And let's make our wiring connection. Click. And that is our laser engraver. We also have some safety glasses, which is very important. In this bag, we have a cleaning cloth, which is important for the laser. And important for our eyes is the shield. That must be on there. That protects our eyes to some extent from the laser. And then the goggles do the rest. We have our power supply, which again plugs in here on the side. We have our USB cable to connect this to a laptop or computer. And we have some extra tools. Oh, look, an additional screw in case you lose that screw. And we are pretty much ready to roll. Ah, here we go. So we have our instructions. We have our warranty card. Some cardstock to play with. Some wood to play with. And this is very, very important. Do not lose this. This is our gauge to focus the laser. So what you do is you put your material down. You loosen this screw. Drop the laser down to where it meets that. Tighten up the screw. Pull the guide away. And you are now focused for engraving on that material. Simple enough. That took, what, two minutes to be up and ready to roll? All I have to do is plug this in and plug it into my computer, which is the source for my files that I would burn. And I am ready to go. So there are several options available for the T1, including they come in different colors. The laser modules are available in 3-watt, 7-watt, which this is a 7-watt, and 12-watt diode lasers. There is also a 1-watt infrared laser available, and those are great for etching and cutting different types of metals. And the 7-watt is a good middle ground. It will do most projects just fine. Also, there are a couple of variations of the T1 hardware, in that this is the basic T1. There is also the T1 that is app-controlled, and that one includes wireless support so that you can design and control the machine straight from your smartphone. A basic version like this one, you must be tethered to a Windows or Apple tablet, PC, something like that. It does not have a wireless capability, nor can you plug a USB stick directly in to load the software. There is no reader inside the basic model, so it can't handle the file. You will also sometimes see some additional bundled accessories, including a nifty carrying case that also doubles as a set of risers, so that you can do taller items. There's also a roller attachment so that you can do tumblers, and Argumum also makes a honeycomb specifically sized for the T1. Now, in the video footage that you are about to see of me burning projects, like over here, you will see that I'm using a honeycomb. I'm actually using one that I already had from another manufacturer. So what the honeycomb does, one, there is a steel plate on the bottom, so that if you are burning through your wood or leather or whatever, that you're not damaging the surface underneath. And also, the raised honeycomb allows the heat to dissipate, so that it, one, makes the project work better, and two, avoids the buildup of heat in the system. The Argumum T1 is fully compatible with the two most popular laser engraver softwares out there, those being Lightburn, and then there's the totally free version, the open source LaserGRBL, or as I like to call it, LaserGerbil, and that's what I'm using in these videos. How well does it engrave? So I took a couple of picture files. So for these, all I had to do was take the photo file that I already had on my hard drive, whether that's a PNG or a JPEG, or there's actually several other photo file formats that work. You just load that straight into the LaserGRBL. You adjust your settings for speed and power, and you can tweak the dimensions as well. So as you see, it made my logo turn out rather nicely. You can see that working over here. And also, I took the black and white version of one of my favorite photos, and just to see what it could do, and again, you see that over here as well. I think that turned out pretty well. I might have darkened it a little bit, but just to show you that, yes, it can engrave. But what about cut? Oh, and by the way, this is 3mm basswood. This is pretty much industry standard. This is a 12x12 panel. The work area on the Artelum T1 is 150x200mm, which is smaller than most workbench-type laser engravers, but it is bigger than many of the portable laser engravers that I have seen. And curiously enough, this 300x300mm size, this 12x12, fits perfectly. Well, maybe not on this stand because of the bumps here, but it fits right underneath. There we go. Just fine, and that works as a good work surface. So with that said, I made a couple of quick little projects that could be used on a layout, just to show you what this can do. Now, where do you get project files? Well, there are literally tens of thousands of free and purchasable... purchasable... yes, that's a real word... files available on the web. You can design your own in a graphics program and export as what's called an SVG file. Or, in my case, all of these projects that I'm going to show you, I actually designed them with the help of AI, actually, with Google's AI program. And in each case, I described what I wanted. It provided a basic file. I did do some tweaks, going, no, I don't like that. I don't like this. Let's change this to this. And in each case, after a few minutes, I had a workable file. So, one of the things that you can do with a laser engraver is, if you are a scratch builder, or even with scenery, making textures. Now, I know this is hard to see from here, but if you look up here, you can get a close-up. This is a brick texture. And these are actually sized to O-scale. This would be an O-scale brick wall of O-scale bricks. And this one was very easy to design. I just said, hey, make me a 148th scale brick wall using bricks that would measure out to blah blah blah blah blah... and would figure out how to carve the mortar lines. And so, this is a texture. So you can see that you could do this with cinder block, you could do it with stone, any type of texture that you need for a wall, for a building, you could make wood siding for a structure, you could make roofing shingles, any texture that you need for scratch building or detailing a building, you just plug it in, tell it what you need. And the AI then gave me a file that I put into LaserGRBL, I tweaked it a little bit and export it, so you can make textures. That is one project you can do on the layout. For combining textures with cutting, and I made a very rudimentary tunnel portal. This one's a little small, this one's more geared towards S or maybe ON30 as far as size-wise, but again, I could make it a lot more detailed, I could make it with the brick texture or whatever. This one literally took less than a minute to design, and it shows. It's not very realistic, but it worked on a kid's layout, maybe on a Christmas layout, something like that. But again, this is just an idea of, hey, instead of casting, instead of scratch building a tunnel portal, you can take a laser engraver and design it and let it do the work for you. Or how about if you are making a custom wood trestle? So this design, now this is not a very realistic design, I understand, but again, this only took me a couple of minutes. I described what I wanted to the Google AI. This is actually the third attempt. It spit out a file, I said, no, no, no, no, no, change this. It spit out a file, no, no, no, no, change this. And this was just by looking at it in LaserGRBL. I want to say LaserGRBL, so bad. Cut it out, then duplicated it and glued two of them together to give it some thickness. And so you can see now, of course, you can change the dimensions. I just made up some dimensions off the top of my head. Now, again, not the most realistic design. If I wanted something more realistic, we could make a few more tweaks to it, but it's certainly faster than me sitting down at a CAD program and drawing it myself. So what about something that's for the layout, but not necessarily on the layout? I was wanting a little rack to hold the bottles of my favorite smoke fluid. So I made this, again, with the help of AI Design. And it has mounting holes, so I can mount it to my fascia board once I put that up there. And this is just simple box construction, tab and slot. As you can see, the corner joints here put together with just a little bit of wood glue, and it's good and sturdy. It'll hold. These bottles aren't that heavy. This will hold just fine. And so lots of little projects around the layout, not necessarily related to rolling stock or scenery, but things that you can use. And so a couple of the warnings about the T1. So first of all, remember, if you get the basic model, you have to be tethered to a laptop or PC. In my case, just horrible timing, my laptop died just as this arrived. And my PC is way on the other side of the room from where my workbench is. So, well, the Artaboom T1 is portable. And I was able to set up a small folding table next to my desk and plug it right into my desktop. And I was ready to roll. You see that on the videos over here, that it's sitting on a little card table. Works just fine. Again, you will want to pick up a honeycomb accessory. It doesn't come with this setup, but it's true that most entry-level laser engravers do not come with a honeycomb. It's an accessory that you have to pick up later, but it's highly recommended so that you not only don't damage the surface that you're working on, but also for heat dissipation and just general quality of the engravings. Thirdly, keep in mind that engraving and especially cutting generates quite a bit of smoke. So keep that in mind with whatever area that you are doing your cutting and engraving, whether that be your workshop, your basement, or at a craft show, keep in mind that that smoke is going to be out there, especially when cutting and especially when using some types of acrylic. It really, really stinks. So again, if you are taking this to a craps show, keep that in mind that the woman selling the Scentsy candles at the booth next door probably is not going to appreciate you very much with your odors of burning sawdust and melting acrylic. Now again, what it's great for? It's just as simple to take apart and put away so that it's not taking up space on your workbench when you are not using it anymore. Matter of fact, I'm going to keep mine in the original box and keep it right under here when I'm not using it. Or you can get that upgrade, that handy carrying case that protects everything. But as you can see, I can even do this without looking at it. And we are one leg, two legs, and we are ready to put it away, out of the way, and not using it anymore. So for the casual engraver, the hobbyist who's only going to do this every now and then, this is a great solution. The 150 by 200 millimeter work area is good for most projects. Even some small construction projects like this one can be done in that type of work area. So what is the Arduinoom T1? Well, it's easy to use, it's easy to store, it's easy to carry, and it makes really good quality engravings and cuts for its size and for its budget. So if you're looking for your first laser engraver just getting started in the hobby, or you're experienced but you don't use it very much, the Arduinoom T1 is a great choice. So follow the link that's on your screen, it's in the comments, and you can also get to it on the links page at MoreOriginalMultimedia.com. Follow that link for special savings right now through the Arduinoom Labs web page. Check out the options, check out the colors, and check out the price. You will be surprised. So that about wraps us up here with the Arduinoom T1. Check it out for yourself at the link on your screen, and I hope you join us next time as we keep the trains running with our next episode of Toy Train Tips and Tricks.