Comments on: HOWTO turn a cheap Chinese laser engraver into a pretty good laser cutter

By: James

James — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:45:14 +0000

The toolchain is fairly uncomplex now.

Design work in inkscape -> output gcode through our custom exporter plugin -> input to LinuxEMC -> output to the servo controller -> laser

At this point, we do not have machine control over laser on/off or laser power level through software. I expect that will be added over the next few months.

I should ask Trevyn to update the article with more details.

By: Nate

Nate — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 02:50:06 +0000

What’s the software stack and workflow like now? I was just reading about Tux Plot because at i3Detroit we have both a vinyl cutter and a DesignJet that speak HPGL, and I was thinking it’d be cool if the plasma cutter,when finished, and the laser, if we ditch the included software, could all be controlled the same way.

So basically, I’m imagining a headless/embedded Linux/EMC box, that eats HPGL and spits out step/direction signals..

By: sigs

sigs — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 10:29:20 +0000

Broken laser cutter link. Here’s the updated one:

http://www.andrewkilpatrick.org/?p=laser_cutter