I was curious if anyone would be interested in having some ready-made material cards to help with visualizing the appearance of text and different speed/power combinations on different materials. This wouldn’t be used to determine the necessary power to cut a material, but instead how different etchings, text sizes, and flex cuts look/feel. Something that looks like:
This way you can spend less time fiddling with cut settings to get your desired look, and instead use a reference card to at least get you close. In terms of size, I managed to just barely squeeze this card into an 5"x8" footprint. The fill tests are 0.3" squares, bitmap test is about 2.5" square, etch & score boxes are about 1"x0.5" split into two 0.5" boxes with different settings on each half.
I think it’d be useful to have hanging by the computers, but wanted some thoughts/opinions first.
One problem with things like this in the past is that they depend a lot on how new the lens is and how recently the machine has been cleaned. But they can be good starting points as long as everyone understands that
This is one of the reasons I have been researching the Lightburn file format, btw, XML. Since the files are based on the specific Laser, specific material, these would need to be auto-generated for ease of use.
There are several cool designs out there, but it would take a looong time for most users to manually make the necessary adjustments to the underlying source file. If these can be tweaked and printed in five minutes then we have winner. This requires the file be generated in Python after the user selects a base material and a range of power/speeds.
It is easy to solve issues for power users, but we need to be careful about leaving the casual users behind. They are the ones that need the assistance the most.
As nasty as it sounds, there are 18 layers (the bitmap layer isn’t shown in image) in the template I originally posted. For what I envision, the only manual adjustments are to layers 28 & 29, where cutting through the material is necessary. Everything else is pretty material agnostic.
That’s fine for a concept. That design and its cousins on Etsy are great. But hardly anything will be accurate outside of the line width and font height. Correct me if I’m wrong, but many users will be mislead out of ignorance. If you want to strip out everything that is reliant on power, material, and speed, then whip something up and let’s take a look.
We have to provide solutions for the average bear. The member that only uses the equipment 2-3 times annually. If you want to make one as a demo to hang on the wall, fine, but it can’t be provided as a source of knowledge. We are trying to build trust with the membership, so everything we provide is examined through that lens.
