The former approach involves engraving a file along a linear path. When it comes to laser cutting, there are two categories of etching: vector and raster etching. Typically, and as the name suggests, a laser cut cuts through the material while an etch shaves off some material from the surface. Determine the sections of the drawings you want to be cut or etched Once you’re happy with the preview image to the left, click on ‘OK’ to execute the edits.Ĭustom Document Property Settings on Inkscape (source)Ĥ. Additionally, the different options under ‘Clean Image’ are also useful in making your raster image as suitable as it can be for conversion. In the dialog window that opens, click on ‘Threshold’ under ‘Color Reduction’ to turn it into a completely Black & White image. Click on ‘Clean image’ on the upper left of the Scan2CAD interface. So it’s good practice to make sure your initial raster image is as clean and as clear as possible. With any conversion software, your output is only as good as your initial image. Navigate to your raster file and click on ‘Open’. Load up your raster image onto Scan2CADīoot up Scan2CAD and click on ‘File’ > ‘Open’. Here’s a breakdown of the steps we went through in the video. When we click okay, that generates the file and you can go ahead and cut the design. Let’s just name this Test, and you’ll see that when we select G-code we also have some G-code specific settings here, should you want to set them in your conversion software. So we can go to file, save as vector, and from here you can see the options and you can go ahead and choose G-code, for example. Scan2CAD supports DXF, DWG, and G-code file formats. The final thing to do is to save out the file. So, we’ve converted the original poor quality raster image to a nice clean vector profile which is optimized for our laser cutting, and we’ve also added scaling information. So, we’re gonna say that the distance we just measured is… Calibrate, and as an example, we’ll say 30, change the unit of measurement to centimeters, click apply, and now the whole drawing has the correct scaling of measurements. You can see it snapping, and you see that that’s auto filled this measurement up here. We could choose orthogonal snap, meaning that the line we’re about to draw would just be perfectly horizontal, and we could also choose snap to endpoints, meaning it will snap to the vectors. To do that, we can click the measure tool, and let’s say, as an example, we want this whole design to be 30 centimeters in width. So, the next thing you may want to do before saving out your file is add scaling so that when you do come to laser cut the design you know that it’s the correct size. So, this is optimized for your laser cutting. Scan2CAD does this to make it the most suitable for CNC cutting, laser cutting, whatever your cutting requirements are. So, it’s important to note here that Scan2CAD has created the image using as few vector entities as possible whilst being accurate to the original image. Pink represents vector arcs and red represents vector lines. So let’s click highlight vectors, just so I can see what we have here. When we are happy, we click okay to save the results to the canvas and we’re now viewing the vector image. If we weren’t happy with the conversion, what we could do now is change the settings and hit run as many times as we want until we are happy with the results. So, we can see the conversion and we can compare that to the original image just to see how accurate it is, and it looks good to me. Now let’s hit run and just preview the results in the preview window here. So, you can see that the slider is quite high on the smooth end, bias to curves, and lines and arcs in the output, meaning that the vector image will be formed of vector lines and and vector arcs. And the defaults here are all probably the best that you’d want to use for laser cutting purposes. So, to do that, we go to the convert raster image tool in Scan2CAD, and because we’re converting this for laser cutting, we’re going to use the outline option. So, the next thing we need to do is convert the image. And that’s pretty much all we need to do with this image, so we’ll click okay, and that will save the cleaning to the canvas. We’ll remove the speckles and holes and move up the speckle and hole size. We’ll threshold the image, just converting everything to black and white since we don’t need the colors. So, first we’ll clean up the image using the clean raster image tool in Scan2CAD. We can see a lot of problems that we need to clean up before we go ahead and convert. We’ll be doing this using Scan2CAD, so first we need to open up the raster image. In this video, I’ll be showing you how to convert an image such as PNG, BMP, JPEG, TIFF, to a vector format for laser cutting, so this would be a file format such as DXF or G-code.
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