Laser experiments

I had my first play with the laser cutter last night. I tried ‘drawing’ on some plywood.

I’ve got some code that processes photos into vector paths which I’ve been using to create drawings with my pen plotter. I wanted to see what it looked like if I ran the same files through the laser cutter.

This is different from the etching functionality that’s inbuilt into the laser. You can see that the laser is moving around drawing the individual paths rather scanning back and forth like it does when it’s etching.

This one is in cutting mode at 30% power, 10% speed:

And 20% power, 10% speed:

The result was ok but not great, the pen plots look better. I don’t think wood is the best material for this. As the paths stack up the detail starts to get lost. I doubt that the process of burning through the wood will ever result in a high enough resolution for detailed prints.

Next up, trying some other materials to see how they behave.

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this looks incredible @james-c! you sound like you’re looking for something more accurate/high def but I actually love the “low-fi” quality, feels more expressive :slight_smile:

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I agree I think this looks really cool!

Wow! that is really impressive :slight_smile:

Love this! And especially love that indeed it’s a new way of plotting! I encourage you to write up your process… Maybe some other member might find use in what you did!