Mechanical Inverter

thingiverse

My initial experiment with my laser cutter was to see how well it could selectively remove material by etching channels in acrylic. The inverter, created from this test, has its plunger pushed in representing '1' on the input and pulled out for '0'. Conversely, a pulled-in plunger shows '0' and a pushed-out one denotes '1' on the output. These conventions are used as the output usually serves as the next gate's input. The inverter was made from 1/8" acrylic, with two passes using my Epilog laser cutter at 10% speed, 60% power, and 600 DPI settings. I confirmed that the channels were etched more than halfway through after two passes with a digital caliper. The parts were then cut using standard vector cutting settings for 1/8" acrylic. After assembly, I taped the halves together to disassemble later. Overall, the process worked well, but it was time-consuming and not recommended for large projects. Two observations from this process were that plastic residue accumulated in the channels and overheating could cause warping of the acrylic. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this experiment.