Hey, I'm Tynan, and today we're looking at the X-Tool D1 Pro 40W version, which,
if you saw it, was too dangerous for the LTT video, but I am trained to know what I'm doing,
and we're going to take a look at it today. This is a little bit different in terms of flow compared to a normal ShortCircuit. As you can see, it's already built, mostly because
it takes like an hour and a half to build, and we had other things that we needed to get done.
And though this is an interesting tool to look at, I'm actually more interested in some of the
other things that come with it, like the fire suppression system and the built-in air assist,
but the fire suppression system in particular. One of the several problems with this type of
laser is the fact that as soon as something gets lit on fire, it's likely just going to get a lot
worse, unless the laser has its own built-in fire suppression system or its own way of stopping.
And even if the laser stops, most materials we're cutting will continue to burn afterwards.
This uses a compressed CO2 cylinder to flood the entire enclosure with CO2 to
snuff out any fire that's inside it and stop it from spreading. This particular laser is a diode
laser, and it's a blue laser at about 455 nanometers, which means you can see it, although
if you see it, you're doing something wrong because it's very dangerous, and it can severely
damage your eyes if you're not careful. Any laser like this should always have an enclosure,
and it is definitely one gripe I have right off the bat, is you can buy this without an enclosure.
That's really dangerous. Thankfully, you can buy an enclosure. Though this one is better than
nothing, I'm not sure if it's going to solve all of the potential gripes I have. Back to the
original Home of ShortCircuit, actually unboxing something. So in here we have a couple of
laser danger signs, which is good. A couple of instruction manuals, assembly guides,
and a whole bunch of panels. Enclosures like this are designed for a couple of reasons. One is to
keep smoke and fumes in one area and be able to vent them out, and the other one is to act as
things that dampen how much power is coming out of them. So these should help lower the
amount of laser power that comes through and make it closer to safe. This enclosure also
comes with a nice little exhaust fan, hose, some mounting hardware, some more mounting hardware,
and the tiny little AC adapter. This is the teeny tiny adapter just for the fan. I'm sure
there are instructions somewhere, but I'm sure I can figure it out. Maybe. This particular enclosure
is designed to be taken apart and ported around with you fairly easily, which is both a good thing
and a bad thing. They say that this is flame-proof material. It feels relatively robust, and I have
seen some people take blow torches to it and actually do burn tests. I don't know how well
it would stand up to the laser blasting at it, and I don't think we're going to test that today,
because I don't know what's in this, and that could potentially be dangerous. I think I might
actually need the instructions for this. All right, laser, you're going to the side for now.
This is my nice LTTstore.com screwdriver with the right hex size bit for this, of course.
Okay, laser, you get to come back.
Ah, there's a nice little inlet space.
There we go, and we have an enclosure. This is definitely a lot better than the
laser just being in the open, but it's not super secure. And if you're using the laser,
definitely don't trust the enclosure to fully protect you from the laser, because there is
a ton of places it can still get out. You definitely still have to wear a laser safety
glasses when operating it. This fan can vent things out, but we also have a few extractor
underneath the table. This has several filters in it. I haven't checked through each one of
them individually, though it does appear as though it should filter out most of the particulate in
VOCs. There is a chance that not all of the dangerous seams will get filtered out,
so venting the output outside is still a safer option. Just on there.
Power switch.
There it goes. That is two of the power systems done. Next up is actually hooking up computer
and power to the laser itself. One of the other things that you can get as an optional add-on,
which also I would strongly recommend is some kind of base for the laser. What we got here
is a nice honeycomb base. These are fairly nice because it lets air fly through it. A lot of
these lasers have an optional air assist, which helps clear out a bunch of the vaporized material
that the laser creates, and these both provide some space in between where the laser is hitting
your material and focused, and the backstop where it gets absorbed, which in this case is a relatively
thin aluminum sheet. This, you need to raise it up off the table, or it will not be able to actually
sit. That's an RTFM moment. Oh, that's a read the manual moment, or read the
manual for those who are so inclined. Sometimes knowing what you're doing is fun. Other times,
just stumbling a little bit is more fun. If I understand how this works correctly,
aha, it is now a good height. Sweet. There is also a height adjustment on the laser body itself,
so we'll get to that soon. I fired it with my laser. This is one of the reasons that I was
interested in this setup to begin with. I've seen and heard of a lot of horror stories of places
burning down when people leave their lasers unattended. Don't do that. Having a system that
helps prevent a fire in any circumstance is good. Even if you're in the same room, if you're not
paying 100% attention, which if you're running a long cut, it's going to happen. Having something
that'll cut the laser power and also deal with the fire itself is a pretty nice quality of life
improvement and also potentially just a life improvement if it works properly.
Not weights. There are the aforementioned compressed air cylinders. These ones, I believe,
are CO2, and they look fairly similar to what you'd use in like airsoft or things like that,
although a little bit bigger, which makes me wonder how many times each one works.
Power adapter? I think this might be what actually kills the power to the laser if it detects a fire.
There's actually quite a few things in here. I believe this is a relay box,
and in here there are a whole bunch of lights, and then also what I'm assuming is a fire detection
system. This appears to be an emitter, and this appears to be a receiver. If there's a fire in
the box and it blocks off enough of the space between them, I believe it'll trigger. It does have
a shutoff for the main power for the laser, which is pretty good. It does have a bunch of CO2
that'll blast into the chamber to put out any fires. Oh, there we go. Okay, so there's the hookups.
I'm only going to put in two of the bottles. They do say you can do that if the volume is small
enough. I have a pretty good feeling that once these are inserted, you are very much not supposed
to take them out, but that may only be after it triggers. I'm not sure whether it punctures the
discs. Just don't want to turn it on and then have it blast in my face. Now that I'm ready to plug
this in, we are all going to put on our safety glasses. X-Tool does ship with a pair of safety
glasses, though I am rather skeptical of them. These are dark green, which generally is not the
normal color of safety glasses for a blue laser. These are ones from Thor Labs that are rated and
certified to a level that is above what we need in this use case. And as you can see, they're
orange. When you're blocking out a blue laser, generally orange is the lack of blue, so it'll
absorb all of that radiation. Whereas with this green one, I'm a lot less certain about it. I did
watch a video of them demoing the safety glasses working properly, where they blasted a laser straight
through it into a power meter, though the amount of reduction in power wasn't really high enough
for me to be content with using something like these. These are expensive, but you only have two
eyes. So we're gonna wear them. Wow, those lights are very orange now. Holy moly. And just as a
general bit of safety things for the user, whenever your laser is on, for these ones in particular,
I would say even if it's powered on, not if the laser's firing, I would have your glasses on.
You'd much rather be safe than sorry with anything like this. And eye damage is not going to be fixed
if it happens. So be careful. So as we can see, all these are green and good to go. Yes. Okay,
so it does work. That's convenient. Next up, make sure it's on the test mode so I don't blast my
ears. Okay, so it is on test. This is where the blowtorch comes in.
Haha, that is what you call overkill. This is powered. I have this sensor. Again, it's on test mode.
Please don't go off. So you can see the flashing orange dot. That means it's detecting a fire.
And then when I pack away, it goes away. Let's actually jump into software and firing this thing
up. All right, laser is powered on. Xtool has its own Xtool Creative Space app, which you can
download off their website. They also say that it is compatible with Lightburn, which generally is,
in my opinion, a better software. We're going to use the Xtool Creative Space today just because
it's easier to get set up and we can just hit the ground running with the download. They sent us a
base material pack, which is pretty expensive for what you get, but it is a wide variety of things.
So there's some benefit to it. That includes everything from making your own necklaces
to some pendants, which you can engrave and color to looks like some leather. Though,
be careful with leather. You want to make sure that it's real leather and not fake leather,
because that can create some really nasty gases if you cut it. Another couple pieces of metal,
some slate or shale, a bunch of different types of plastic and cardboard for either cards or
whatever else you want to make out of them. A bunch of random types of wood, which are plywoods.
Again, be a little bit careful, especially with things that have a lot of glue or adhesive in them.
It can create some nasty fumes if you're not careful and not aware of it. A bunch of different
types of felts and colored acrylic for this particular laser. You can cut colored acrylics
because the light will be absorbed by it and it'll blast it away, but be aware that different
lasers have different restrictions when it comes to what kinds of materials they can cut or etch.
Jumping into cutting stuff, we're going to start with wood because it creates the least
nasty smelling fumes and is pretty forgiving. Things like this, just slap it down wherever
once we, ah, so as you can see, this does have a nice little focus dot. I'm going to read through
the focusing instructions on it. I'm going to guess we're going to have to adjust the total height.
So I believe that for focusing, you need to have this set like this piece here on the material.
Though I'll confirm that with the instructions on their app. Ah, that's connected. They have
things, something like Thingiverse where you can upload things for free and people can download it
and cut it themselves on their own machines. It's kind of nice. Let's just send it and see what happens.
I should probably make sure that it's focused first though. Aha, there it is.
One thing I'm not sure about is if this knows where it is relative to the grid
or if it just starts wherever you place it. So just in case it starts wherever you place it,
I'm going to get this adjusted so it's cutting starting at the corner and that should be good,
hopefully. If not, we'll find out. There is also a framing option which just gives it,
gives you the outer profile of the cut. It can be quite nice to make sure that you placed something
correctly. That was a limit switch. It does stop itself from sending itself further away than it
expects. It's very loud and hard to ignore, which is nice. I essentially just manually moved it
until it stopped beeping and did a full frame. Now we're actually going to turn it on. I'm going
to grab a fire extinguisher. One moment, please. Conveniently, there's one right outside the door.
All right, time to push the button.
What is my backup if things start going wrong? Power button down there. All right, so start.
Press the button on the device. She's in the enclosure. All right, I'm going to come around.
All right, and away we go. You know how I was talking about being able to tell what side of the piece you're starting on?
Yeah, this should start. Close this up again. Hopefully no more loud beep. Oh, so that's a
laser. Currently, it's just doing a etching pass, so it's not going all the way through the material.
It's just kind of burning away the top layer. After it's done its first pass, it'll do the
cut pass. I'm going to cut this one a little bit short and shift to just a smaller section of the
cut, just as a proof of concept for the machine itself rather than going through the entire cut.
Let's take a gander at the thingy.
Smells like campfire. It's not bad, especially with no air assist. I will say their software is
pretty easy to use, which is nice. And away we go.
As anyone who's ever worked with lasers like this, the thing that takes the longest time
is trying to do an etch because it covers a full area, whereas when you're just doing line cuts,
it's way faster. Open her up. Oh, that actually doesn't smell too bad.
Oh, are the cutting parameters correct? No, they are not.
So that's the one side, mini little ShortCircuit logo. Unfortunately,
didn't cut all the way through. Interesting. You can even see a couple of different heights of
different layers, and that's just the depth. Just how much laser power goes onto it, and it burns
away a little bit more, and that kind of serves as your color. There are a couple of different
algorithms for it, but this one's relatively straightforward and easy to implement. But
I definitely want to test out this fire suppression system. And to do that,
we're going to head over to the shop and do it there. I have a couple of pieces of cardboard,
relatively common to try to cut on devices like this, and I'm going to light them on fire.
It does the thing. All right. Well,
okay. So it'll blast at every 20 seconds, I think, although the fire looks very out at this point.
So this line will get cold enough where it might actually cause problems,
depending on what you're doing. But they do tell you about that. So it definitely does enough to
snuff out this size of chamber with a decently sized fire. It works pretty well. I didn't give it
ideal conditions, but it still produced a pretty good cut. But there's a bunch of
happy-ats with this system in particular. It's really not safe, and people shouldn't
really buy lasers that don't have purpose-built enclosures to keep them safe. Honestly, in my
opinion, this product shouldn't really exist in the form it is. It's a good machine. The technology
inside the laser itself is cool, and it does a very good job for what it needs to do. But
it's not something that I could recommend. I personally would consider running a machine like
this, but if I did, I'd build a custom enclosure that is safe and operates it properly and has
properly rated glass or Windows. So at least my takeaway from this machine in particular is
I wouldn't really recommend buying it, unless you really know what you're doing. But even then,
if you know what you're doing, you're probably buying something else. If you were going to buy
this particular system, one of the other complicated parts is you kind of have to buy
everything individually, which means the total price is a little bit difficult to nail down.
The base machine that we got was the X-Tool D1 Pro 20W, which is about 1400 US. And we also got
the 40W diode upgrade kit, which is another 1400 bucks. And then you have a fume extraction and
purification system, which runs you another thousand, unless you want to run this out the door.
And then an enclosure, which costs another 200. Plus, in this particular setup,
the fire suppression system, which is only 200 bucks. Well, my opinion is that the laser itself,
not great overall. This is a pretty nice tool. And if you can implement it well in a laser setup
that you have or anything else that could catch fire, it could be a nice tool to save you a fair
bit of money if you're not paying really close attention to your heat generating objects.
If you liked this video, you should go check out the unboxing I did of the Prusa Mark 4.
It's quite a printer.