The Atomstack X7 Pro

First post, background

I live in the Netherlands, and I like to make things. I like to tinker with Arduinos/ESP32s and other electronics, and ever since I started doing that I was looking for ways to make nice enclosures for those projects. I usually resorted to the jigsaw, but I was almost never happy with how that turned out.

I had been eyeing CO2 laser cutters for years, but for hobby purposes I simply couldn't justify the expense. Approximately early 2020 the first generations of diode lasers appeared on the market. Late 2020 I bought a TwoTrees 4.5W diode laser cutter. It wasn't very expensive, and I honestly wasn't very hopeful that it would be very useful. Its weak laser could barely cut through light 3mm plywood, and the mechanism wasn't very accurate. Still, I made some fun projects with it, and it showed me what was possible.

Fast forward to early June 2020, I bought an Atomstack X7 Pro, which has a 10W laser. I included the optional air assist unit. I briefly considered the 20W model, but that was much more expensive, and as this is for hobby purposes, I couldn't quite justify that price difference.

Cutting through 3 or 4 mm of light wood is no problem. The emphasis on light is because the laser does have problems with heavier wood, you'll need more passes and will end up with sooty edges. The Atomstack marketing department optimistically shows videos of this unit cutting through 12mm wood but they must use balsa wood or something, because with plywood it's simply not possible. I did a test with 8mm plywood, and after many (7, I think) passes it did cut through it, but it took a very long time, had extremely sooty edges and wasn't very accurate. The font and back of the cut piece had different dimensions.

Engraving wood is no problem. After a bit of testing with different laser power levels and different head speeds, I can reliably engrave any sort of wood I have access to. Due to it's high(er) laser power it can do it relatively fast, too.

So in short, if you stay within its limits, the X7 Pro is a fantastic unit.

Although I learned a lot from the TwoTrees laser cutter, I feel that only now, with the Atomstack unit, I can make real progress. I want to use this blog to document what I learn, so that I can read it back, and hopefully it can be of benefit to other people starting in laser cutting.

Final remark: this blog is not sponsored in any way by Atomstack. I bought the unit with my own money. While I'm generally happy with it, I won't hesitate to point out less-than-ideal things if I encounter them.