K40 Whisperer: Engraving Pictures

so how do you make a picture with the laser cutter using k40 whisper well once again we're gonna go to Inkscape and like i said earlier we're gonna recommend using Inkscape version 0.92 or later it produces an SVG file that's compatible with k4u whisper and it'll just save you a lot of hassle down the road so how do we do this we start with a blank document in Inkscape we're gonna do file import and we're just going to import up an image and this is an image I downloaded from Wikimedia Commons I'm gonna leave it as embedded if you embed the image it makes it part of the SVG file it's still a it makes it a PNG file that's embedded inside the SVG file so you don't have to worry about having both files available at all times if you link it and you delete the image file the SVG will no longer work so I'm going to say okay there so there's the file I have I'm gonna zoom out a little bit and let's so the what we're gonna do is we're gonna make this the size we want it to be so I'm gonna I want to make this a relatively small project so I'm gonna make it let's say two-and-a-half well okay so 50 millimeters tall and I want to lock this so that I change both dimensions at the same time and so if I changed the height the width is gonna also scale so now I that scaled I can zoom back way back in here and now I have a so the width is 60 millimeters and the height is 50 millimeters and I have my image and Inkscape what I can do now because you're in Inkscape you can also add vector to this we don't have to but I can so I have I'm gonna create a box and apparently the box I created last time was filled so I'm gonna have to go in and do object fill and Stroke and I'm gonna X out the fill and I want this to I want this to be a cut so I'm going to cut the picture out afterwards so I'm gonna make it at the make it full red 255 red and this this line is is extra thick so I'm gonna make it thin so I can just cut out around around this image here I'm using the arrow keys to move it around a little bit to get my cut in the right place so now what I could do what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna so this box has a little bit of a round on it so I'm gonna grab this and I can grab this this handle here and change the radius I'm gonna make it totally square and then I'll be able to go back and make this cut rate worthy images and it's gonna snap to the sides of the image here I hope so that snapped to the height I believe oh yeah but snap to Bowl so so right now I have my image and I just have a vector cut around it so I can cut out the image after I after I engrave it and the one thing we're gonna want to do after this is go ahead and change the size of the page the document properties resize to this selection or drawing so I don't have anything selected so it's going to resize it to everything and that's going to make it just the exact same size as the box that I put around there once again make sure my custom size is set to either millimeters or inches they'll tell cape verde whisper what the size in real physical units should be and that is I should be all set I should be able to bring this into k4y whisper I'll have the cut around the outside so I can bring this right into cape verde whisper it's gonna interpret the colors in terms of dint in terms of intensity and and we should be able to get an image out of this so let's do a save as and I'm gonna save it as an image file image demo say save and we're ready to go into k40 whisper we could initialize the laser cutter right now but I'm gonna skip that step for a moment and open the design file image demo and the image is gonna come in as one bit per pixel that's either a pure black or pure white and that's the default setting in k40 whisper because that's the laser setting or the way the laser works is it's either on or off the only way to get gray images out of cape verde out of a k4u laser without modifying the board is to use what's called a dither or half tone which is using small dots to represent the Grays where the dots are closer together for the darker Gray's or black and the dots are farther apart for for white so we're gonna go into the raster settings and we're going to enable halftone or dither and that's gonna make the display display back into the grayscale image and the image that's displayed is just what I said it's gray it's not actually displaying the dither door halftone image but it's just displaying it as great to indicate that it's gonna try to represent the Grays using a using halftone there's a few other options in here you can engrave bottom-up what that's going to do is it's gonna make the laser jump to the bottom of the image and then in gray from the bottom up typically it'll integrate from the top down that's just an option you have the resolution so that's that's how small each individual dot in the desert is gonna be five hundred dpi seems to work good it's if you go to a thousand dpi it you know end up with a lot more pauses in the in the raster ring as the data is being sent to the laser just because there's a lot of there's a bottleneck in the USB cable the next few options are a little more complicated what this does is it adjusts how how quickly the colors the the Grays change from dark to light and what I've done is I've set it up with all the defaults to work for something that would be kind of a general picture on piece of wood I tried a few different pieces of wood types of wood to see what would happen these settings seemed to work well if if you want to mess with them you can basically what what's going on here is this slope black is changing the slope of this left-hand side of the curve so what this curve is is it's dark to white and dark to white on both axes and it's basically the output level versus the input level so the input level is on the on the horizontal axis and and increasing this slope here makes the transition to white quicker so if you engrave an image and the darks you can't tell the difference between a a medium dark and a very dark it all looks black then you want to increase this slope and that's that's essentially the the that's the main thing that I found in when we were when I was engraving images is that the the very dark colors kind of all blend together unless unless you do some adjustment here and that's that's where this default setting is this goes to two point five the slope white is is the other on the other and it's this slope up here and you have to have that set to something so that the that the black slope has an effect if he said if you set that one which is essentially no no change to the differing it you the black slope has no effect either so with a lot of experimenting I came up with these settings the transition is just how quickly or how abruptly that that transition occur so if the default is three point five if I increase that it makes this corner sharper and you can make it less sharp like I said this these the default settings were were based on a lot of experimenting was a few different materials trying to come up with something that would that would work for somebody out of the box come in don't change anything just turn on the halftone dither engrave something quickly and it should look reasonably well there's a lot of messing around and tweaking that can be done in here to take to your liking or to your material you may find that something works better than another I guess I skipped over the scanline step basically that's the distance the laser head travels in the y-direction for each scanline so it's gonna move to the right and it's going to move down 0.2 0 0 2 inches and it's going to move to the left and cut and then it's gonna go down so that's how many and and the minimum number there is is one one thousandth of an inch and you can go all the way up to about sixty thousand seven inch so that's like a 1/16 of an inch so you can have pretty big gaps and if you want to do some cross hatching you can only do it horizontal but that depending on what you're looking for that might be something you want to do but I guess I have these all back set to the defaults except I have I'm selected to have two own dither to make it look grayscale so then we can close that settings dialog we initialize the laser and then again I'm gonna unlock the rail so I can move it manually now I have the position of the laser head where I want it to be I'm gonna increase the raster engrave to 150 millimeters per second and once again I'm going to lower the e vector cut to eight and we'll click raster and grave and see what happens it's gonna take a moment moment to calculate all the required data it's gonna process as much data as possible so that there's not a lot of processing going on while the laser is cutting now that that is complete we can move down to vector cut I'm going to increase the power output to about 10 milliamps from the laser and then we press vector cut and then we have our engraved picture you

Channel: Scorch Works

Views: 110,020

Keywords: K40, Laser, K40Whisperer, raster, image, picture, dither, halftone

Id: wdRsg4wllmo

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017