Make a flat light emitting lighting by processing acrylic into a light guide plate with a laser cutter

I wanted to make a plane luminescent light. This is the same mechanism used in the backlighting of laptop computers, where a pattern is drawn on the acrylic sheet to diffuse the light, and LEDs are used to inject light from the sides of the acrylic. The light entering from the side diffuses through the pattern of the acrylic sheet and shines on a flat surface.

Drawing the pattern

In Illustrator, draw the dot pattern and outline, and save it as an SVG file.

Processing with EtcherLaserPro

Processing the light guide plate

Process 3mm transparent acrylic. The processing parameters for the pattern part are...

・Speed: 10000mm/min
・Power: 30%
・Hatching: 0.05mm</div

The processing parameters for the cut are...

・Speed: 600mm/min
・Power: 100%

I did above.

I think I may have spaced the patterns a bit too far apart.

I also cut out another transparent board without a pattern.

Processing the diffuser plate

Next, cut out a diffuser plate from a milky white acrylic sheet to be attached to the surface.

Processing completed in about a minute.

Let the light in

Light guide plate

I'll use a tape LED to inject light from the side of the processed acrylic. You can see how the light is diffused in the dots processed by the laser cutter.

The dots are quite bright.

Diffuser plate

As a test, I let the light in from the side of the milky white acrylic. There was no light at all, and it only got brighter near the LED.

Light guide plate + diffuser plate

I made a triple-layered structure of light guide plate, transparent acrylic, and diffusion plate, and used LED tape to inject light from the sides. The laser cutter's processing cross section is very beautiful. A saw won't get it this clean.

The whole thing lit up beautifully. The dots are so far apart that you can see a bit of the pattern, but the whole thing is glowing. It is very beautiful.