ASMLaser

This is a laser engraver project. It makes perfect sense that ASML can be used for laser engraving, right, right, right. It’s cool, bro.

Ch.0 The Root of All Evil

Everything started with the evil Taobao. One day while looking for components on Taobao, I happened to see all kinds of micro stepper motors. Who among us junk hoarders can refuse a few bucks’ worth of electronic trinkets?

Like this one

And this one

And this one too, I’ll take one of each, thanks

After receiving them, I immediately started testing. To hold the motors for testing, I 3D printed a test base for them. Little did I know it would spiral out of control, and the rest of the story began right here

Ch.1 Slide Module

Once all the motors were driven, looking at the various slide motors moving back and forth on the desk like crazy, and then looking at the open-source micro slides online, I felt none of the designs were quite reasonable. An evil idea came to mind: make a slide module. And so came slide module V1/V2/V3/V4/V4.5

The slide design was a tearful struggle; I’ll open a separate project to talk about it later. Skipping ten thousand words here, here’s a 3D render of the finished product

I designed an FPC using LCSC EDA to adapt the stepper motor to an SH1.0 interface, and also designed a micro switch for limit and homing

I printed 10 slides using PA6-CF material for testing, and the consistency was pretty good. At this point, the slide unit was considered complete.

Ch.2 XY Unit

With the slides ready, the most important core of a laser engraver is the XY structure. I designed a simple structure to test the slide performance.

After simple testing, I verified that the linear unit and coordinated movement had no issues, and started designing the final XY structure.

I referenced the domestic Xingguang 4n laser engraver, which uses a gantry structure with dual Y linear units moving the X unit. This structure has good stability, but since the Y unit needs to drive the entire X structure, there are requirements for the Y unit’s driving capability.

After much thought, I ultimately did not choose the same structure as the Xingguang 4n laser engraver. The reason? Of course, it’s not cool enough. An ASML laser engraver must be able to load and unload materials from the side! So I designed this structure: the X-axis uses a drawer-style structure that can be pulled out and pushed in from the side. Pull out the X-axis, place the material to be processed, push the X-axis in, and once it detects the X-axis is pushed in, processing starts. After completion, you can pull out the X-axis to take out the processed material. Convenient for loading and unloading, and very cool.

The engraver is starting to take shape.

Ch.3 Driver

Since I wanted the entire ASMLaser to work with just a single USB-C cable without any decoy, I spent some time choosing the stepper motor driver chip. The driver chip should be as small as possible, with low load, and able to run on 5V. I finally chose ST’s STSPIN220, with a 3x3x1.0 VFQFON package, 1.8-10V operating voltage, and up to 256 microstepping, perfectly meeting the design requirements.

The final “ASML” driver board includes a USB-C interface, two stepper motor interfaces, a Laser PWM driver interface, and a buzzer.

The PCBA was simple, no issues encountered, passed on the first try. But note that the STSPIN220 is a fixed off-time PWM current control chip; the REF pin cannot be directly set to maximum current like the DRV8825. You need to set the REF voltage matching the motor based on the sampling resistor for it to work properly.

Still used JLCPCB’s one-stop service for assembly (complaining that JLCPCB’s SMT standard service delivery has been unstable lately), with beautiful black matte solder mask.

Ch.4 GRBL

For a laser engraver project, the simplest software solution is grbl, which supports many host programs and is easy to debug. The open-source repositories mainly choose between FluidNC and grblHAL (ESP32). Due to the need for deep secondary development, I finally chose the grblHAL repository as the base, and used the mature LightBurn as the host software.

Cloned the repo, opened VScode, read the code—wait, wait, wait! It’s 2026 already, of course AI debugs the code. After a tough night of work (ChatGPT working overtime), the functionality was perfectly implemented.

The result is quite good

Ch.5 Appearance

The appearance references an ASML piggy bank (does any expert know which ASML model this is)

The appearance design was pure manual labor, modeling away non-stop. I designed an openable hatch on the right side of the machine so you can see the mechanical structure moving inside. If you can’t see it, it’s like you didn’t make it :). I could stare at this kind of moving structure all day

Put in a 40mm birch wood piece, and start engraving!