Laser Fire

The other day my CO2 laser was happily cutting away at some acrylic when I noticed that the power meter was suddenly lighting up. "That meter doesn't have any kind of backlight" I thought to myself as I stared in awe at what I believed was the miracle of spontaneous illumination device generation. Then I realized it was getting brighter and brighter. I lifted up the control panel and sure enough, fire was coming out of the wrong part of the laser.




Now I need to repair a bunch of traces and figure out what component vaporized leaving nothing but a charred crater in the middle of the high-voltage board.

The exciting part of all this, however, is that I finally got to use the big red button marked "Emergency Stop". It was as satisfying as I'd always imagined.

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