Laser cutter prototyping

[antonyoneill]

I had a spare hour yesterday and thought it would be a good idea to get some hands-on experience with the laser cutter, ahead of producing a moving gift for some friends!

Someone posted a link to a logbook style journal of their project progress and that has inspired me to give a little insight into the mistakes I made yesterday while playing around.

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Goal of the session:

• Become more comfortable using the laser cutter unsupervised

Notable lessons:

1. Cleaning the laser before isn’t as daunting as I anticipated, it’s very intuitive
2. You can only be logged into Ruby on one device at a time (I was uploading designs from my laptop)
3. While Ruby does give a design feature, it’s not great and if you change text it will probably lose the font
4. Every time you create a job from a design you must re-select the material. every. time. I used 3mm ply, and 3 out of 5 jobs were executed with the wrong 3mm material selected (the middle dog tag didn’t cut all the way through, one of my “cut” layers was engraved rather than cut)
5. You don’t need to crop the design in inkscape to the “page” size, Ruby does that for you
6. If you want the design cut out of the sheet at the end, you better remember to put a bounding rectangle around the design. But you should make sure that the rectangle isn’t outside the page (whoops)
7. It’s really important to clean the machine after use, especially if you’ve been using it for several jobs

Outcome:

• I made two dog tags, one for my cockapoo Albie, and one for his “cousin” Jackson
• I made a mess on my ply of the prototype design

Next Steps:

• Clean up the SVG layers and be more deliberate about the colours
• Run a speed / power test to experiment with different styles within my design
• Put a bounding rectangle around the design
• Keep practising

[Brendon_Hatcher]

You don’t need to crop the design in inkscape to the “page” size, Ruby does that for you

Good job!

5. You don’t need to crop the design in inkscape to the “page” size, Ruby does that for you
   Hmm. What I understand is that in Inkscape you need to shrink the page to match the object.
   If you don’t, Ruby imports the objects inside a bounding box that is A4 size. This can make it hard to position for cutting.
   I’ll check next time I am in front of the laser.

For custom fonts, convert the text to a path in Inkscape, and then you don’t have to worry about whether Ruby will be able to display/use the font.

Cool tags!

[antonyoneill]

So I got another 45 minutes with the laser cutter tonight and thought I’d try out a few more bits and see if I could eliminate some of my mistakes from the other night.

I realised I hadn’t shared the actual design (which is still evolving). I imagine a two-three layer finished product:

0. Base layer being some kind of blue, this will represent water, both for the river and in the parks
1. First ply will have the parks of south london engraved, then the water bodies all cut out of the layer
2. Second ply layer will have roads of central/south london cut out so that only the roads remain

The layers will be bonded in some way (wood glue likely), then finally some markers to represent where my friends have lived over the last 5-6 years, and will be presented to them once they’ve moved into their new home - imminently…

Let’s just hope he doesn’t find this thread, cus he lives just up the road…

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Today went a lot better!

Goal of the session:

• Test out the new designs
• Leave with a complete set of layers of the prototype (A5)

Notable lessons:

• The laser won’t recognise filled objects for cutting, only stroked objects. This is OK because you can update your design in Ruby:
  
  
• When trying to cut out areas, you need to make sure the area is large enough to actually cut out (see some of the water in the southern parks)
• When you’re dissecting a design with several large cuts… Don’t cut an outline Instead consider engraving a border, and cut out a few mm away.
• Roads layer … well.
  1. Similar to the above for small water holes, you need to ensure that your cuts aren’t too small.
  2. If you have too many cuts all in the same place, the laser will likely abandon your job.
     
     

Outcome:

• I validated that the river will look cool with a blue sheet behind (blue roll in lieu of anything “proper”)
• The water and parks came out quite nicely

Next Steps:

• I need to do some work on the roads design
• Engrave a border and cut an outer edge, probably on both layers

[asander1 (Andy Sanderson)]

Nice! Take a look at this London Map project another member did a few years back - may give you some ideas!

Multilayered laser-cut map of London

[image] Fresh from the Openstreetmap Mines, comes this hideously detailed vector map of London. I’m sorting and tidying all the layers and intend to eventually assemble a 2.5D map of the city with the underground and railways picked out in separate layers, diving through holes in the “ground” where appropriate. Some experimentation will be needed before I decide on a scale. I want to go as wide as possible on one cutting-bed-sized sheet, so I predict lots of spindly cuts of tube lines that snap…

[petra (Petra Backovska)]

Its a beaut!

[antonyoneill]

I won’t lie - that post is what inspired me to do this project! But I certainly don’t have the graphics skills to pull off what @tomnewsom was able to! Hence, my simpler, and beginner-friendly version…

I am going to use some of his posts to simplify those roads though

Thanks @petra!