Laser + etching 0 - Plotting 1 and can the Diode laser cut aluminium foil ? 

people might have been confused, yes the laser can cut foil. but the last foils with the tiniest traces are actually cut by a blade. so the laser sucked vs my plotter blade... plotter wins in this case. hard to believer but true

For the vacuum: in industrial cutters table are made of felt about 4-5mm thick and under the felt are perforated metal sheets for vacuum suction to get through felt and hold materials that are cutted. Maybe you can create small frame and try to simulate above? P.S. go with another headphones :)

I mentioned this in the last vid, but.. You could attach a 405nm single mode diode and those can focus to a very tiny dot. Then use pc circuit board positive photoresist on the foil and any part hit with the beam will dissolve in the developer. Then etch as usual. It should be possible to get very clean and very tiny etched lines (Wikipedia says 0.5 µm) this way, albeit with a little more effort. Could also use Negative resist but then you have to fully expose all the copper you want instead.

Sweet effort as usual. :)

A thermal camera and some current in the coil would allow you to see coil shorts.

Ok so laser is clearly off the table but (as you already suggested) you could try better focus and more passes at lower power but also I found my laser cuts wood much much better with an air blower attachment.

So in terms of a diode laser plotter/cutter the main issue is how to properly make the coil stick to the cutting base? Have you tried your kitchen glue solution? I really would like to know what experiences you made with it.

have you tried setting it up in raster etching as opposed to vector cutting, than setting up the coil diagonally as oppose to parallel to the beam in that way maybe the coil wont get hot enough to bend and deform, where I am going with this is basically setting up the laser beam to chip away the foil instead of cutting it directly and reflecting back, by the way this is an impressive result do you think it will work with a kiss cut machine

Hi. Regarding using normal plotter machines: I found out that a regular plotter like a Silhouette Portrait 3 isn't suitable enough for those tiny cuts. Probably because the blade just gets pulled over the foil, increasing the risk of ripping it or not being able to cut consistently enough. This still seems to be an ok method if you are fine with many passes with increasing force steps for a larger coil (>1mm track size and spacing). But still I'd say there's at least a 70-80% chance some spots won't cut and need to be cut manually. So all in all regular plotters seem to be a waste of time or my unit simply sucks (I've used a brand new blade btw). So I'm going to try a CNC method soon to hopefully be able to reach my desired track size of 0.5mm with an 0.5mm spacing. Do you think thats well feasable with a thicker foil as well (around 20 micron I guess)? And which CNC software(s) do you use/recommend using?

It evaporates the paint and takes the alu with it. without it it wont be able to cut alu , not even close. my text in the video missed the paint part :) (editor crashed) and yes i dont mean a scope haha something like a magnifier... i got one of those cheap zoom cameras usb.. but the frame rate and image quality sucks so... ill just dont care how wide the distance between traces are. as long as it works

Big question - how did Piega do it?? they almost look like a PCB!

Btw which plotter did you use to make the .6mm coil?

I think it was better without 20 secs of the introduction ) But it's good for new visitors. So, I'm not sure PS And yeah.. What about making a compression driver with using these membranes? Nobody else made this afaik, but in this case many limitations will go away (as I see this in my head).

9:20 Алюминий можно травить щёлочью. Aluminum can be etched with alkali.