Over the last few years we have seen an explosion of open gantry diode based laser cutters. Manufacturers capitalized on the availability of UV lasers from the BlueRay player market. These lasers opened up the world of laser cutting to users who couldn’t justify the expense of a traditional CO2 based laser and the solid state devices didn’t require as much supporting hardware so they were able to be produced much cheaper. They came at a very high cost though in another aspect, safety. A reflection from an open gantry UV laser can blind a person before their blink response has a chance to kick in. This isn’t just an up close issue, anyone within a few hundred feet is susceptible. The WeCreat Vision is rising to the challenge of fixing this issue.
The WeCreat Vision has found a perfect balance between convenience, safety, and functionality with one simple trick, it’s a fully enclosed laser that automatically adjusts its height! The enclosure’s sides are double walled with the inner wall being attached to the lid. A set of motors move the lid up and down allowing the machine to auto focus on a large variance of material thicknesses or to allow the optional rotary attachment to be placed inside the machine. The lid is made from what appears to be a laser blocking acrylic (we cannot independently verify its efficacy) and the walls are metal keeping all dangerous laser radiation enclosed.
The lid raises 140mm and has a built in HD camera. The camera makes aligning your cuts with your material easy and accurate. When the machine is fully extended, you can easily place the rotary in the laser and there is a port to plugin the rotary without needing to unplug the Y axis like on many other lasers. If a rotary isn’t what you need but instead you want to engrave larger sheet goods, the bottom from the Vision can be removed and an optional (untested) extension can be hooked up allowing 145” of material to be automatically fed through.
Of course one of the other problems typically found with lower cost laser cutters is the software. You are either stuck with awful barely usable software or paying extra for an overly complicated option better focused for industrial production work than the needs of the average hobby user or small scale shop. WeCreat has fixed this also with a great piece of software called WeCreat MakeIt! (yes, the exclamation point is in the name, while I like it, I’m not exclamation point excited about it). Most features are fully available to users although you will have to pay a subscription to access features like built in AI image creation. The software is nicely featured and easy to use allowing you to connect to the Vision either over USB or Wifi. I prefer to do my design creation in either CAD or a vector drawing application so the basic drawing tools in MakeIt! are good enough for me and the simplicity definitely keeps the interface clean. I really love that when picking power settings for known materials you pick from an example image of how dark your engraving will be rather than just guessing at a number to see how it comes out.
My engraves and cuts came out great although my cuts were quite slow as is typical for 20W diodes (I would love to see how the optional 40W head performs). I ran the optional fume extractor and while it helped, I would definitely suggest venting outside rather than relying on the filtration from the fume extractor. The autofocus feature worked well no matter what thickness of material I put in the machine and it was nice not needing to worry about keeping track of some kind of focusing device.
If you are in the market for a diode based laser especially if you intend to use it a great deal with a rotary for engraving mugs and tumblers, the WeCreat Vision is a great option and at this time my top pick on the market.
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