Could I have some tuition on use of the laser cutter please? Does one have to create an account and upload files? Or can the files be loaded to the machine locally?
I would like to engrave a pattern onto a thin (preferably sub mm, but it needs to be thin enough to be flexible) plastic sheet. Does anyone know how you control the depth of engraving onto such a material?
What is the minimum feature size?
Did anyone work out how to vary the depth of the engraving? I would like to have different depths in different parts of the features, not just set the depth globally.
Glowforge only seems to supply acrylic plastic, and that is too thick (i.e. too rigid) for my purpose.
I need the material to be a good insulator. Plywood or hardboard is unlikely to be good enough, particularly if it absorbs moisture. And it is not flexible enough.
Thanks.
Thanks for the help with engraving and cutting this.
The manual does suggest the use of Inkscape. Filled areas are allocated to engraving and lines are cut all the way through.
However, the SVG file produced by Inkscape was problematic. So tried saving as PNG. That sort of worked, but as an engraved object only. The cut / engrave info had been lost.
Then another software app (Affinity Affinity – Professional Creative Software) was used to improve the SVG file, and that then engraved and cut without a problem.
A bit of a puzzle why Inkscape could not produce an adequate SVG file. Will have a look into it when I have time. Or if anyone has solved this please reply.
Just to bring this snippet over here, as the Mastodon thread looks like it has useful info:
Thanks Ed, I had a look at the responses.
Someone suggested FreeCAD. I am already using FreeCAD on another project, so will also have a go with that for the laser cutting project. But it would also be helpful to understand the problem with using Inkscape.
The laser cutter cuts right through the material wherever there is a shape outline, and engraves where there is infill. The problem is with infilling only.
The specific problem with Inkscape is the overlapping of filled shapes. Even if I create a union of them in Inkscape, the laser cutter still sees them as a collection of individual shapes. Rather than simply combining them as a flat engraving, it does what looks like an XOR of the shapes. For example if I have an infilled circle (without an outline of course) with an infilled rectangle (also without an outline) crossing it, then the laser cutter engraves just the parts of the circle that are not coincident with the rectangle, and just the parts of the rectangle that are not coincident with the circle. i.e. the part where they overlap is not engraved, and I wanted it all to be engraved.
I will avoid using overlapping shapes!
Is this page at all helpful on the question of infill for overlapping shapes?
Creating filled regions - Evil Mad Scientist Wiki
Yes thanks, that is helpful.
I am wondering whether the laser cutter could be used for microfluidics. Engrave the channels, and cut holes through for connecting to tubes. After cleaning out any debris, a tape over the top would enclose the channels. They can be used to separate suspended particles that have differing sizes in a curved / spiral channel. For example to separate out cancer cells from normal blood cells: An ultra-high-throughput spiral microfluidic biochip for the enrichment of circulating tumor cells - YouTube Shear modulated inertial microfluidic biochip: High throughput separation of circulating tumor cells - YouTube