Pretty please with sugar on top…Can we get a class setup for laser training soon? New member here and I would love to attend! Thanks!
I can train you on Saturday on the Full Spectrum laser cutter. I’ll be at the Space after 2 P.M., working on the Nitrogen Laser Project until 6 P.M., then the Science Committee Potluck at 7. I can take out a half-hour some time in there to hold a quick training session. I can’t train you on Lasersaurus, as I don’t know anything about its operation.
Awesome, I will be there for board game day, and have two new member friends that also want to learn. I’ll sync with them and try for 3pm or so. Thanks!
I’d like to join in as well if that’s cool! I know most of the process, but would be good to be formally trained.
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Chris Bradshaw and I (Dave Villegas) will be there about 3pm and try to carve out a half hour. See you then!
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Great, I’ll be there!
What I would really like is some training on how to:
- get the best results (design tips for input files)
- deeper understanding on how to use the RetinaEngrave software
- How to engrave on the Lasersaurus
I took the laser training, but it was almost entirely on safety and proper operation. Which is clearly needed, but that left me having to do expensive experimentation to figure things out.
-Robert
I will be teaching a class on Wednesday July 1st at 8:00 PM that covers the Lasersaur. I won’t go into design and best practices but if you’d like to discuss things after the class would be a good time. Or start a new thread on the forum and ping my username, I’ll reply to your questions there.
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I sympathize, and I agree that it would be great to have training on actually using the laser equipment. However, the required training is just safety and basic operation. We actually tell people in the class that each situation is different and the user will have to experiment to find the best results.
Content that can be laser cut comes from such a vast range of sources that it’s not practical to teach that specifically for the laser cutter. Everyone wants to cut things for very different purposes. Some folks it’s art or jewelry and others it’s robotics and electronics or whatever random thing they happen to be interested in.
What we’re really talking about here is classes on computer aided design, illustration, image manipulation, etc. I think we should definitely have those classes but the scope reaches far beyond the laser cutters and the laser training classes. Perhaps it could be done in a series of classes about general CNC concepts and workflows. One for basic 2D work, basic 3D work, and maybe one more focused on artwork and creative uses of CNC.
One example of what I didn’t know until I experimented was that you needed to use hairline stroke lines for vector cutting. I started by using the default “1pt” lines in Illustrator but the cutter ended up making 3 passes to cut these. The problem was that it was trying to cut the thickness of 1pt. It was not at all obvious what was happening.
The other is that the RetinaEngrave software seems to add a lot of extra paths to the vector view that are not in my drawing. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. I have to make sure I recolor what I actually want to cut in the software and ensure the number of passes for the extra is set to 0.
It just seems to me that there is a bit of knowledge about how to properly build your vector/bitmap work for use with the laser. I know how to use Inkscape and Illustrator. What I don’t know is how to get the results I’m looking for on the laser cutter.
For engraving, should bitmaps be converted to grayscale? pure 2 color B&W? left in color for RetinaEngrave to handle?
Another example is that I would love to be able to engrave/cut acrylic awards for some one-off competitions. I tried to do an engrave on acrylic the other day and it turned out less than spectacular. I’m still not certain if the engrave is limited to a on/off mapping of pixels or if it can vary the power based on the bitmap to get variation in depth (The darker the pixel the higher the power).
-Robert
Robert, all good points. Some of the issues you’re running into are application specific like the ghost lines and having to separate them out by color so they don’t print (guessing it’s a CAD file of some sort). That speaks to what I was saying earlier about content coming from so many different places. That might be a problem for one application but not others. Same for the stroke width since some applications and formats don’t even have stroke width. The wiki could be a good place to consolidate this kind of information as people come across it in their own workflows.
The raster on the FSL machine is on or off, there’s no in between for gray values. It can do dithering which will give the appearance of grays but not the depth or third dimension of actually having the laser power mapped to the pixel value. The depth can be achieved by running the raster many times over and over with the threshold changing each time, eventually the densest areas will have more passes and they will be engraved deeper. For example run 256 passes and change the threshold by a value of 1 each time (8-bit per channel images have 256 possible color values). Or say 16 passes while changing the threshold by 16 each time or 8 passes while changing the threshold by 32 each time.
The Lasersaur in theory could map individual pixels to laser values so you get depth in the engraving based on the pixel values but in practice not sure how well it would work. The developers are working on it currently but no ETA. If you’re adventurous the G-code for raster can be generated elsewhere and run on the Lasersaur.
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I’m running about 15 minutes late - hit some nasty traffic on 635
Richard, we’ll be hanging around for a bit longer, maybe doing a board game bit. We’ll look for you through the day.