Mini laser help needed

I have two grandsons, (age - 11 & 15) The boys having seen what I do with my lasers, they came up with an idea to make money for themselves and their schools, that is to make cork coasters with their school logos on them. The boys even did pricing research on materials. Those two boys even contacted an advertising company who came up with sales figures for a town their size, (100,000 people). The boys told me that they had it figured that they can sale 4 piece coaster sets to their schools for $3.00 a set, the school then sales them through the band and sports kids at $10.00 a set. After overhead, the boys can make $232.00 per 100 sets sold and the school will make $700.00 per 100 sets sold. That’s a couple of smart boys I
have !!!
Now I am looking for a couple of small table top lasers for the boys, you know, the little ones with about 4"x4" working area for coasters. About a hundred bucks OR LESS. (OS will have to be windows 11).
Does anyone have any ideas to a fairly good one?
Thank you for time and concern in this matter.
R Cline

That price point is going to be a genuine challenge. I don’t know of any commercially available laser less than $100. I see a TwoTrees 2.5W on Amazon for $150 which is 50% more than what you’re talking about and is quite low powered but otherwise reasonably kitted out and can run LightBurn. The closest I see to something approaching $100 is one of those dodgy desktop engravers for $130 that are more novelties and will likely just end up being frustrating and uses proprietary software.

The obvious answers to small portable but capable lasers would be one of the mini offerings from Ortur or Neje but they’re well past your budget at more than $200.

hello PY: I just now found one in Amazon. It’s a “Cenoz” for beginners, small table top jobbie,
200 x 290mm working space with a 3000mw laser. I did a price search of “0 to 100 dollars” and found this one. It"s only $99.99 so I’m going for it… will give an update later.
Thank you for your input.
R Cline

Looked it up and the hardware seems surprisingly good for $100. Some research shows that the priced was recently reduced from $200.

II see one other post on this forum that references this laser:

I suspect LightBurn won’t work with this laser out of the box. However, you may be able to do a cheap board swap or possibly a software upgrade to enable it. The native software looks painful.

EDIT: I examined the require usb-serial driver and looks like it uses a very common CH341 chip.

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PY: I think you are right, also I saw this - “Software support windows -XP/7/8/10/Android/ (▲Windows Vista / MAC /ios, Unix, Linux are not supported)” I decided to take my Ortur 7W. (aka 1.6 w.) to the boys and let them just use that for now. I’m going to order the Cenoz for the fun of it. Like you said : Their software is lacking! Besides, I have a friend, (Gill) at ortur who will sell me an Ortur controller board. I have had so much trouble, (all in the past now) with my 15 w. that Gill and I became good friends. Annyway, I’ll keep you posted on the Cenoz. Lets see what happens.
R Cline

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The price point makes it an interesting little project to see how cheaply you could get it to become a useful member of society. A firmware swap would be ideal. I suspect it may be running an Arduino derived board but hard to say without more details. Let us know what you discover.

Hello Py: Your help was great. Thank you. Windows messed up, I think, - when I went into system there was no activation button. I found it by right clicking on all the buttons, finally found it. All completed now. I had trouble with light burn trial, it’s different from my year old paid script of LB. I had about 4 hours of trouble “before” I remembered, Randy, you fool, things
will start working when you “finally” remember to turn the fire button !!!
Anyway, starting lap top #2 now.
R Cline

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