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.