Overview of the Laser Cutter
- 12"H x 24"W bed
- Laser is in the back of the machine
- Laser light is reflected by mirrors to the material
- Focusing
- Fixturing the material to be cut
- There is a jig for etching cylindrical objects like pint glasses
- Exhaust Filter/Fan setup
- Cleaning and Maintenance
- Safety issues
Laser Cutter CUPS Driver
- Heavily modified by our own Brandon Edens
- Etching pass, then vector cutting pass
- Thin (0.5 pt) red (RGB #FF0000) lines make vector cuts
- All other colors will etch
- Multiple print queues for different types of materials
- Lab Monitors can create new queues for you for materials not already defined
Preparing Files for the Laser Cutter
Inkscape works best and it's free and open source
- We do final printing to the laser cutter using Inkscape
- SVG is the preferred file format
- Can also go from DXF files to cutter using QCad
- Inkscape can open Adobe Illustrator files, but has trouble when there are too many layers
- Ensure that all your colors are in RGB format. CMYK will not work for vector cuts.
Acceptable Materials for Etching and Cutting
- Acrylic aka Plexiglass (or Perspex if you're British) up to 0.25" thick
- Wood up to 0.25" thick (may require multiple vector passes to cut through)
- Paper
- Matte Board (great for prototyping)
- Cardboard (also great for prototyping)
- Natural Fiber Cloth (cotton, silk, wool, etc)
Acceptable Materials for Etching Only
- Glass
- Annodized aluminum
- Marble, stone, brick
Forbidden Materials
- Vinyl (releases chlorine gas and kills us)
- Lexan (doesn't cut and releases Sulfuric Acid)
Inkscape Oddities
- Use Control instead of Shift to maintain aspect ratio when resizing objects
- Use Control instead of Cmd for copy, paste, etc under OS X
- Copy and Paste is wonky under OS X, better to use Duplicate when stamping out a bunch of the same thing.