Payment got accepted, and then the first thing: the seller needed an extra $150 for shipping it by DHL to Switzerland :-(. So I placed the order and hoped for the best. There is some buyer protection as well on AliExpress, so I thought maybe the risk of loosing that money is worth what I could get? It was not the cheapest offer for this kind of machine, but still at an amazing low price of $750 (!!!). I saw others with no clear sign that they ship to the closest sea port only and you have to pick it up there and deal with customs/etc. Most important he seemed to have shipped items to Europe to the destination address and offered registered shipping with DHL and others. I ended up with a seller which seemed to have sold several of these machines in the past year, and his store was specialized for CNC and laser machines. Can I trust reviews or are they fake as well? The problem with these offers on AliExpress (or Ebay, etc) is that the sellers seem to copy-paste the specs and images, and it is really hard to tell how reliable a seller is.

dxf fileĪliExpress 4040 Laser (Image source: AliExpress) Create the drawings with red, black and blue color e.g.What finally triggered again my interest was an article published on Hackaday: has reverse engineered that protocol to the commonly used M2 nano controller board (see “ K40 Whisperer” and published his work as open source and published everything on With his software, it gets as simple as that: So I had put the idea of using a laser cutter aside. So all the software was rather disappointing to me.

Or LaserDRW, a piece of software I consider as ‘not so easy to use’. What still was a concern for me was the software part: it seems many of these machines work with a CorelDraw (hacked?) version. The general consent seemed to be that these machines get better and better, and you get what you pay for. And some of them were indeed ‘horror’ stories. So I have followed many these ‘ultra cheap Chinese laser cutter’ stories you can buy on eBay (just search the internet for ‘k40 laser cutter’, or see this Hackaday lead article). I learned with using a 3D printer that faster cycles makes a huge difference, especially doing projects on weekends. Great and professional machine! Using it requires advance planning (the FabLab is open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday). We do have one of these expensive laser cutting machines in our FabLab at the Lucerne University, a 100 Watt AKJ-6090.

60 kg Weekend Project Box arrived on the front door

Laserdrw k40