I have been collecting items for the electrical side of the build.
The high voltage Laser PSU came with the Laser tube from France.
An emergency stop mushroom from ebay seller sunny-store6 for £1.20 ($1.86) inc P&P.
The 24V 15A PSU cost me £16.03 ($24.85) inc P&P from ebay seller 7colorstore,
This is their generic ebay picture, but believe it or not it really did come with the edge bent as shown in the picture!
10 adjustable Buck voltage converter regulators for £0.99 ($1.55) each from ebay seller chesk_2013.
These can take an input voltage of 4.5-35V and provide an adjustable output voltage of 1.5-35V at 92% efficiency for a maximum current draw of 2A, or 3A with an additional heat sink.
I will use these for dropping the 24V PSU to 9V for the Arduino based control panel and the relays connected to it, which will be based on the one designed by Scott Schwarts.
The Stepper driver board I am using is a clone of the Protoneer V3.00 board designed for use with grbl that cost me £3.10 inc P&P from ebay seller party-888.
It comes without any jumpers, but I have hundreds of these anyway, so no great loss here.
The A4988 stepper drivers are from ebay seller moncss and cost me $7.43 (£4.82) for 5 (I bought 10), so less than £1.00 each!
The first set of Pololu compatible stepper drivers I bought cost me $12.00 (£7.75) each in November 2011, this just shows how the price of components are coming down.
0.3-6l/min flow meter from ebay seller accecity-ca for £1.50 ($2.35) + £0.52 ($0.80) P&P.
I have also ordered an AWC708C Lite DSP from AliExpress seller SanWeiHouse for $283.10 (£192.04 after exchange commission) with free shipping to the UK.
I paid via paypal, even though this is not an official payment method for AliExpress, however it will give me a level of buyer protection that their other payment methods will not.
I have yet to see how much customs hit me for when the DSP arrives.
Fortunately I will be able to claim back the VAT part, as I have a VAT registered company, however, I will still have to pay the duty and handling charges.
At a guess, duty will be charged at around 2.5% on the declared value of goods + shipping, then VAT charged at 20% on all of this. So £192.04 x 2.5% = £4.80 duty, then £196.84 x 20% = £39.37 VAT, and then a £10.00 handling charge, for a grand total of around £245.00 (or £206.84 ex VAT).
This is significantly cheaper than paying $425.00 (£274.20) + $70.00 (£45.10) international P&P for effectively the same controller from Lightobject.
I would still have to pay duty (£7.98), VAT (£65.45) and the handling charge (£10.00), which would bring the total cost to £402.74 (or £337.28 ex VAT).
Even buying the DSP from Lightobject whilst on vacation in the USA, I would still have to pay $20-30.00 (£13-20.00) shipping, to then bring it back in my luggage, it would still cost me around £305.00.
Either way I save £100-130.00 ($155-200.00) by buying from China.
I am not interested in the modifications that have been made to the Lightobject version of this DSP for the American market, as I do not live in the USA and am only interested in metric measurements.
You can download all the latest firmware, manuals, Lasercad, etc from the downloads section of the Sinjoe listing for this controller.
I will no doubt still be buying my mirror mounts and laser focus mounts from Lightobject, as I have yet to find anyone else who stocks these specific items. All the ebay and AliExpress sellers only stock the ‘Pro’ mounts which are too big for my laser build.