The Development of a Low-Cost Two-Axis CNC Laser Engraver with a Bluetooth Connection

This paper presents a compact multi-purpose computer numerical control (CNC) laser engraver design. The implementation of the CNC system becomes complex to cope with customers’ needs and requires a large amount of cost in the application of industries. This paper’s goal is to develop a CNC 2D Laser Engraver in a compact system with a Bluetooth connection. The board is equipped with 4 pinouts of the A4988 motor driver, Arduino with a CNC Shield controller, and a motor stepper driver. The CNC machine receives an order from Android with Bluetooth HC-05, and GRBL orders the laser to be on and the stepper motor will move respectively with coordinates determined by GRBL. The specialty of this system is that the users can easily change whether they want to perform operations with smartphones, microSD cards, or computers and produce 2D drawings and objects in different media types. The result from this paper shows that the engraving process of the Cilacap State of Polytechnic logo requires a laser intensity of 400 to 750 mW while engraving acrylic media requires a laser intensity of 400 - 600 mW depending on the speed of the stepper motor that we set at the beginning process.