From Render, to real
I mentioned that we recently bought a laser etching machine, and we're trying out various art concepts on the Decent with it.
As it happens, Decent customer Jeremy Clark posted monochromatic art for the de1app, and I thought it'd work well with the laser etching. Jeremy sent me the line-art (Adobe Illustrator) source to this latte art stripe, which was one of my favorites.
Decent engineer Alex has been trying different laser power, laser speed, and…. angles of etching. This was not something I expected but the angle of the etch has a huge effect on the resulting color. Makes sense, since color is reflected light, but still…
It turns out that etching at 45º angle, at high power, causes aluminum to go light brown, quite close to the color of a latte. And this color persists at various viewing angles. All the powder coating is burned off, giving it a crisp edge.
On the right is my photoshop mockup of the idea. On the top is our most successful laser etch on a real chassis.
This week we're going to make a full scale etch of this design.
I'm quite pleased that Alex managaged to get something with a nice color, and high contrast, as most of our experiments have come out grey, like the test you can see above the middle stripe.
More tests to follow…
-john
Updated 2021/11/14