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"Untitled4" laser pixel etching

Goofin' with my laser etcher. A piece of my pixel art is broken down and different colors etch with different settings

kalKal
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New job, new place, cycles of depression and anxiety, being lazy. I haven't gotten around to much, it feels like. But i've been messing with my laser etcher and getting obscene mileage out of a graphics program i wrote in highschool. This is more of that.

I don't remember which image i clipped "Untitled4.png" out of but it's a messy array of greyscale pixels in a kinda stripey pattern. I opened it in paint.NET and posterized it to 5 colors: black, three greys and almost white.

Then for each darker color i made a copy and used the magic wand in flood mode with 0% tolerance to isolate the pixels of only that color, making all others transparent. Then i changed the non-transparent pixels in each copy to black

Then i made some rough, ugly guesses about what settings i want for each image. LaserGRBL is kinda rudimentary when it comes to managing a project (but, still, it's fantastic for the price) so it's a pill to import each image and fiddle with settings and keep track of where you are in the process. I could've made it five separate burns (one each for the greys and black gets two passes) but ...actually that sounds like more of a pill.

Now i just sit back and let it run. There's always something a little magic about complicated, precise mechanical operations. I know it's probably not going to look quite how i want but whatever, it's something. It's experience. Probably everything's going to be too dark for real contrast, i should do more passes at lower power.


colorspacingmm/spowerdir
21/mm1500
50%horiz
31/mm150075%vert
42.2/mm1500100%horiz
5.12.2/mm150075%vert
5.2
1/mm90050%diag

5.Untitled4.nc

LaserGRBL "quick save" -- i guess this is just gcode or whatever?

Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) - 842.95 kB - 10/09/2022 at 04:40

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5.Untitled4-header&footer.nc

LaserGRBL "advanced save" -- the gcode (or whatever) plus header and footer. which i think you'd only want if you also have a sculpfun s9? actually all these files except the .pdn are pretty much useless to pretty much everyone...

Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) - 843.01 kB - 10/09/2022 at 04:40

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5.Untitled4.lps

LaserGRBL "save project" -- is this editable somehow? surely, surely...

lps - 40.87 kB - 10/09/2022 at 04:37

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Untitled4.pdn

paint.NET file w/each color as a layer. the original and the isolated layers are around the project somewhere

pdn - 21.59 kB - 10/09/2022 at 04:37

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  • 56min into the burn

    Kal10/09/2022 at 05:04 0 comments

    The head deffo bumped the extractor's snout. And there are a couple things i want to change, but i'm gonna let it ride; 1) LaserGRBL predicted about 1:45 so i'm probably almost halfway through 2) it looks, you know, at least pretty cool.

    For a next attempt: Start much finer than 1 pass per mm and vary line density more. Power ratings between maybe 25% and 75%. Be more careful with the tape. And i'm curious if the diagonal pass is going to f' everything up.

    There was so much potential:

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