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A project log for 12V Lasercutter

This laser cutter is made of a wooden base and some metal rails. It's very cheap and uses RaspberryPi for all, data and control.

jack-pearseJack Pearse 01/25/2016 at 13:370 Comments

Okay folks. It's 2016 now and christmas time is over. That means it's project time!

My raspberryPi software which I started earlier was developed for the RaspberryPi 1. Now I struggled with some small issues why I changed my mind. I will now use the raspberryPI 2.

Here are the reasons:

Please be patient. There is still a lot of work to be done. In February I will move the laser cutter to the workshop of Digitales Aachen e.V. where I will do the testing and development of the software.

After a long time of thinking about G-Code I now decided to drop it. All G-Code generators I have found on the network are ugly. The results are not smooth enough, a lot of post processing is necessary. The G-Code is not a real standard which means that every machine treats g-code differently.

This project should be a laser cutter. The best thing for laser cutters is vector graphics. The best tools for vector graphics I have seen so far are Affinity Designer, Illustrator and Inkscape. All these tools are able to export svg vector format.

My goal is now to read and interpret real svg files. There will be some restrictions at the beginning, but svg seems to be the right format for laser cutters. G-Code for me is deprecatedwhy I won't use it anymore.

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