Bill's Laser Marking Work

Synrad has the largest installed base of sealed Carbon Dioxide Lasers in the world.  I was hired in 1996 to design laser marking equipment for Synrad.  Basically, a laser marker is a box containing a pair of motorized mirrors, used to steer a laser beam in two dimensions.  The steered laser beam can be used to mark (e.g. with a company logo or bar code) or cut wood, paper, plastics, and coated metals.

Notice

I thank Synrad for graciously allowing me to use company photos on this site.  I am no longer employed by Synrad, and do not represent, sell, or service Synrad equipment.  For more information on Synrad lasers and marking products, please see their site, http://www.synrad.com.

DH Marking Head

This was my first product design at Synrad.  I demonstrated a prototype at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) seven months after joining the company.  The first revenue units were shipped eleven months after I joined Synrad.  The DH Marking Head was chosen as the Product of the Month by Photonics Tech Briefs in February 1998.

I designed the digital control circuitry, the fiber optic data link, and an ISA bus fiber link card.  I wrote the operating software in Analog Devices DSP assembly language, and programmed Xilinx FPGAs at each end of the fiber link.  I managed production release of the product, including turnkey manufacturing of all printed circuit assemblies, and CE Mark certification testing.

Fenix and the FH Index Marking Head

Fenix was my second product design at Synrad.  (Who is that handsome fellow in the ad, anyway?)  Where the DH marking head was a component that had to be mated (and optically aligned) to a laser and power supply, Fenix is a completely integrated machine.  Plug it in, turn it on, and mark.  Fenix lowered the market price point of comparable systems by 40%.  The FH Index Marking Head is simply the marking engine of Fenix, sold as a component.

Fenix was sold for several years by Domino Laser as the DGM-1, which you can see here.

I again designed digital control circuitry, and wrote the code.  I contributed to the mechanical design of the board stack, marking head, and the saddlebag power supplies.  Production manager Jack Downs called my Fenix product release the smoothest new product introduction he had ever seen.

Tracker

The DH, Fenix, and FH Index are all static marking machines.  That is, they mark on stationary parts.  Tracker, my third product design at Synrad, marks up to 225 characters per second on parts moving under the head at line speeds to 1.5 m/s.  For Tracker, I re-wrote the operating code, from the ground up, in C.  I added a field software upgrade feature.  I enhanced the optically isolated part handling I/O to accommodate rapid position encoder inputs.

The FH Index and FH Tracker products are displayed on the Synrad web site, here.  The Tracking version of Fenix was sold by Domino Laser for several years as the DGM-1.