Cryptoucan™ laser engraving revisited

Written by Dominik Joe Pantůček on November 15, 2018.

It has been almost two months since we started working on laser engraving on our Cryptoucan™ prototypes. Read on to find out how we have improved the process and see our promising results. And of course to see some pictures.

As we have already shown you[1], the molding process ensures that each Cryptoucan™ is a solid object with no hollow sections and to identify each device – and to allow some customization for the end users – a laser engraving[2] can be used. Not only it can be used, it actually is used and with promising results we decided it is time to start perfecting it.

Firstly we wanted to test the possibility of engraving QR[3] codes with small modules to allow storing large arbitrary data. The results can be seen in Picture 1 below and although they are far from perfect, the tests confirmed laser engraving as the right approach for us.

Picture 1: Sample laser engravings of $57\times 57$ modules.

Secondly we tried the same QR codes with uppercase and lowercase letters from A to Z and some line weights to test the possible resolution using our epoxy. As shown in Picture 2, even without much tinkering the letters are clearly visible and as there are some parameters of the laser engraving machine to fine-tune we expect the resulting labels to look really sharp.

Picture 2: Sample laser engravings of Latin lowercase and uppercase letters alongside with lines of varying thickness and QR code.

Thirdly we needed to find the right parameters for the engraving machine. Depicted in Picture 3 you can find our attempts with various pulse-lengths, track thickness and energy levels. The upper-right attempt looks awesome!

Picture 3: Testing results for various pulse-lengths and other parameters.

And finally we got to testing how the Cryptoucan™ logo would look like. The results in Picture 4 rocked us when we first saw them. Although there is still room for improvement, we did not expect such clear and sharp images without some pre-processing.

Picture 4: Laser-engraved Cryptoucan™ logos

All in all the laser engraving of our epoxy monoliths was definitely the right choice and we cannot wait to see our testing batch engraved in a few weeks!

 

Thank you for following us on our road to Cryptoucan™ mass production and come back next Thursday for more. See ya!

References

1. https://trustica.cz/en/2018/06/28/cryptoucan-development-design-of-the-device-shell/

2. https://trustica.cz/en/2018/09/28/cryptoucan-laser-engraving/

3. Wikipedia contributors. (2018, October 30). QR code. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:23, November 14, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=QR_code&oldid=866408880