Using Inkscape for CNC Plasma Cutting

hello everybody Welcome to we build stuff and today I'm going to attempt to show you how to use inkscape which is a type of drawing software to design some sort of shape or logo or whatever uh to send to a plasma cutter now I'm doing this video specifically for my students based on the software that we are using which is an older version of inkscape that runs on the machines that we have available however a lot of this is going to work for other people my goal with this is to find an image or something on Google Google image or whatever browser you like uh whether it's a dxf file as the final output or a JPEG PNG SVG something and turn it into a vector drawing so here's how I would be starting this so the first thing I've done I went and found a picture that I liked now this one to find it I went to Google images and I typed in skull headphones dxf because dxf that can maybe get me as close as I can to an idea now you could draw everything from scratch but this is just to show you how to you know find an image online and use that as part of your design or at least a starting process and I found this one here now eventually after clicking through all the uh clickbait ads where it says download and 10 things pop up I finally got here I press download well maybe it's one of those maybe it's that one it was one of them and I was able to eventually get the picture that I wanted now the one that it came out with when it was all done it was called Vector _ 20427 dxf well I'm going to go ahead and open that with inkscape so I right click open with inkscape and it should open that now it's going to ask me how does it want to read it I'm just going to leave it at scale factor one I don't want it to be huge or too small uh there's no text for this one so we're just going to press okay and see what happens wait for that to load okay so it has sent me this on a blank canvas I can go ahead and zoom in by pressing control and then up and down off my w my mouse wheel I could press plus or minus on my keyboard if I click and hold the middle Mouse wheel and drag that moves it around right click that'll bring up something so if you've never used inkscape before the best way to figure out how to do stuff is just by clicking and seeing what happens so here I have this dxf image it is already loaded it up like this and currently if I zoom in I'm going to go over to the left on my screen and I'm looking for a thing that says edit paths by node if I click that and just click somewhere it's going to highlight a node I can zoom in on that maybe if that's helpful a node is the end of a line or part of your pathway now that one starts here I'm going to click and drag and it ends here but it doesn't continue something is wrong with this drawing whoever created this it's it looks cool but the pathway is broken a plasma cutter or a laser cutter or some sort of machine that requires Pathways to be uh complete Mega confused with this drawing so I need to somehow connect each of these together I could redraw the whole thing or in excape I'm going to have to do some trial and error and figure out what functions are going to work so I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to box select everything grab my little arrow tool on the top left shortcut for that is F1 and you'll see that it has highlighted all the different shapes now ideally for me there shouldn't be this many shapes there might be the headphone that should be one shape the skull that should be one shape and then each of the individual teeth one shape the eye socket things and the nose however it's giv me multiple ones so if I want to join these all together I'm going to go to path and I'm going to scroll down and read each one and figure out what they do well what happens if I press Union well that looks Dreadful at least for my purposes I'm going to undo that I can go to path and try exclusion let's see what happens there nothing because I didn't have it selected box selected all path what happens if I press exclusion it looks Dreadful edit undo you're going to basically click until it joins them together I have a feeling that going to a path and then combine will join them together excellent so far I like the way that this looks now I haven't even done anything else other than I haven't looked at any of these I haven't looked at anything over here but I kind of want to now figure out where are all these little things being stored layers I'm going to look to the right at least for mine and here it says view layers or the shortcut is shift control L if you click that it brings it up and it looks like I have a layer called zero I can turn it on and off with the eyeball I could press lock which means I can't change it at all but so far everything's on zero excellent I can live with that if I click and drag it it moves everything good what if I just want to change part of it uh maybe the eyeballs I can double click zoom in and now you'll see that these nodes there we go they're all connected it's one pathway that keeps going all the way around and around and around and around up and around okay so far that one's good when I'm teaching student this I want to see two colors I want to see black and white because we have a piece of metal it's either going to be a certain shape on the outside with holes in it now in this case the holes are going to be represented by the eyeballs the nose and stuff like that so I'm going to go ahead and fill this with black and white instead of this thin outline cuz a piece of metal like that would be thinner than string I'm going to go to the left and I'm going to find my dropper or the oh here we go it's called The Fill bounded areas shortcut is shift F7 click that and let's just see what happens okay I filled that up I want to fill up the skull in each individual tooth click click click click click until something happens excellent now looking at this though I've got these weird outlines here that that's really not going to work for me in this specific drawing so I'm just going to undo all that quickly undo undo I'm just pressing control Zed okay we're back to that how about we create a new layer for this fill I'm going to go over to the right and if your thing has disappeared you click there and the shortcut again is shift control L I'm going to create a new layer with a plus button and I'm going to call it Phill layer I had a buddy named Phil once I haven't seen him in a while press add and now I have a new one I can turn on and off so zero is my original fill there's nothing there yet but I'm going to make sure that's highlighted I'm going to go back over to the fill bounded areas shift F7 is the shortcut click click let's fill each of those in I can zoom in if that's easier to see what's going on click click click click click click now it still has those weird lines however if I go over here to the right and I'm going to close off layer zero there we go you can see the difference as I click on and off now my fill layer on and off is represented by by all this black stuff now if this was a piece of metal there would the these headphones would not be connected to the skull the teeth would not be connected to the rest of the skull you know kind of like how it normally is they can fall out right and then you put it under your pillow ignore that uh zoom in and I need to find some way to connect each of these pieces so that when it's done and out of one solid piece of metal nothing falls apart I can hang it up on the wall hang it from my rearview mirror just just hang it from tree anywhere I want so I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to try and draw some kind of shape now there's a lot of different shapes you can make you could make rectangles so over here I have create rectangles and squares I'm going to click that and I want to make sure that it is the right color I've got a bunch of colors down at the bottom I want black because everything else is black cool let's make a rectangle well that looks Dreadful could I rotate it maybe if I press this click back and forth just in the middle of it it it goes from changing its outside shape click it again and I can change its rotation well that kind of works let's uh shrink it down no that's not it got to click shrink it down maybe something like that click rotate and I can sit in there play with that wow doesn't that look fantastic it's joined okay so that's one way to do it the other way that I prefer because as a somebody who uses paper pens and paints and stuff I like to draw uh with those kind of tools and add curves instead of just straight lines I can scroll down here and find somewhere on this side panel something about bezier curves and if you don't know which icon represents the word hover over it and wait a second there we go draw bezier curves and straight lines the shortcut for that is shift F6 if I click that it's going to allow me to drop a node similar to when I saw nodes all here dot dot dot dot dot all the way around I want to add my own node so shift F6 is the shortcut I'm going to click somewhere the teeth CU I want to create a box that connects these two I'm going to click and if I click it just makes a straight line if I click and hold my mouse button down it allows me to draw curves o ah well that'll work you're not going to see it but I want to add a little bit of a curve to this one so I'm going to click and drag maybe not like that that looks goofy just a little bit of a curve and the end of this I need to drop it somewhere if I just drop it here and keep clicking it it's useless it's not going to help me at all I'm going to zoom in and I need to make sure ends there we go did you see how that highlighted if I click over it kind of turns a different color highlight click and now I've got one shape now let's zoom out and see what that looked like well that's just given me a outline I want it to be full of black how how on Earth do I do that well I'm going to look over here and I need to find something that says fill and stroke now it's going to be one of these so I can sit and go over each one each one each one or I can use the shortcut which is shift contrl F shift crlf and something little pops up there fill and stroke currently Phil is set to X well I want to give it a flat color black is good that looks great however I know that there's still a stroke around it see if I can click it on off you can still see the outline going I'm going to click fill go to my stroke paint or stroke style stroke paint I'm going to get rid of it press X there we go that's the shape that I drew so if I actually go and click on this you can see it highlighted in red there for a moment as it flashes on and off there it is it has each of my little lines and shapes I could actually go back and edit those if I want click and drag them click and drag them as long as I'm using up here on the top left the edit paths by node or F2 now I'm just going to leave that for now let's add these other ones quickly I'll put this in a time lapse I'm going to do this in the bezi curves click okay fantastic I got all those drawing lets zoom out and see how it looks all right the teeth are all connected looks like he's kind of wearing braces now that's all right and uh do we have any other floating black objects that are not connected it's pretty obvious the headphones are not connected so in order to listen to stuff I I guess I should add him some ears or something so let's uh again use the bezier curves because that's what I'm going to be teaching with this one specifically drop put a thing down let's go about that tall I'm going to give it a little curve just to give it some interesting look finish my line I need to fill it so I'm going to go fill sorry stroke paint is on X fill is on solid awesome now I could try to redraw that over here make it exact or in my casee I'm just going to select that edit copy edit paste there it is and I've got that one here now it's the exact same as this I want to flip it I want to give it a mirror so I'm going to Here let drop it into this eyeball there for a second I want to flip it I'm going to go through here and try to figure out because I've never used this program before and go back and forth until I find something that says flip horizontal or some words like that H maybe I should slow down oh object down here down here flip horizontal the shortcut for that is the letter H click okay let's try to line that up and make it look kind of close to the other one excellent all right we now have a drawing that looks like everything is connected black is metal white is holes that have been cut out this might work for us now what else can I do here it looks cool but the machine the plasma cutter will not interpret this as a drawing that it can cut out because if I select everything thing you'll see that it's more than one shape I need to combine this all and turn it into one solid shape there's a couple different ways to do this maybe I could go to path combine let's see what happens o well it did that to it it did that to it that's like the only one that looks like it's good maybe I can't select all of these at once and do this let's press edit undo combine maybe I have to do one at a time I could press the headphones maybe hold yeah okay so I can select each one separately if I press shift click shift shift there we go I've selected those three let's see will it let me combine those path combine ew gross maybe one at a time I'll click uh just the headphones shift click I've got those two selected path combine it still doesn't work so what options do I have I could go through and keep doing different ones until eventually it works maybe Union click click shift will Union work object path there it is path Union so far so good there we go it's created those all right let's try to join the other one together click shift click object PA there it is path Union it's joined him together I think he has to pay his dues now if I click now because this is still separate I've taken his headphones off click now click the skull path Union there we go those are all one shape but oh his teeth fell out let's uh Zoom down here so I could go through each one at a time and I'll do that but I'm also going to show one other way where let's say I didn't want to go through that I could make sure everything is selected bound big box select over everything and find here there's going to be something that says some way to turn it into a bit map let's see edit let's see oh edit make a bit bitmat copy if I click that if you notice for a moment that is hesitated I now have two drawings one drawing is the one that I was working on the other one is a pixelated copy here we have a vector image and over here if I zoom in you'll see that this has nice smooth curves which is all made out of nodes remember I can edit my nodes over here we have this pixelated looking thing it looks close from far away but my machine won't interpret that well what was the point it does it is all connected but maybe I can take this new drawing object find over here where is it I want to somehow turn it from a bit map look for the word bit map object do you see the word bit map I don't path do you see the board bit map there it is Trace bit map click now it's giving me all these options that have popped up how many colors do I want I only want two I'm going to bring that down to two colors I'm going to go down here scans I don't know what that means but let's do two because I think it's two colors stack I don't I don't want to Stack anything I just want one and then over here smooth let's keep it rough I'm going to unclick that now so far I don't know what's going to happen yet but if I go here to live preview click it'll show up something in here I could even make this bigger or smaller maybe it'll let me zoom in nope but I tried if I press Okay click well something happened it says execute the trace if you look down there tiny press X well it still looks the same doesn't it click and move it and look it has created another thing so in the middle we have our pixelated stuff over to the right our newly created one and everything's joined and then our old one where it's still multiple pieces together so there's different options to get to the final uh goal here of getting one solid block but this is a way that you can create anything you can add words text uh you can add different shapes maybe uh maybe I want to you know whoa I don't even know what that is but let's undo that for now either way we've got this okay I'm going to go ahead and get rid of these other stuff for now click I'm just going to select them all find the delete key on my keyboard delete and I've got my one final thing okay we've come up up with our design and now what resize it now the piece of metal that I'm going to be using for this is according to my ruler so according to ruler it is from here z00 just under 8 Ines it's 7 and 3/4 long now let's zoom in there we go 7 and 3/4 long to there so to make sure my plasma cutter doesn't accidentally you know cut around the metal it all stays on I'm going to shrink the height of my drawing to 7.5 or 7 and A2 you can convert that into centimeters if you like but that's the way that this machine runs so let's do that I'm going to highlight everything or in this case it's one giant picture I'm going to highlight it all click whatever and at the top it gives me an option here for width and height well I think I want to make the height 7.5 so I'm going to change that to 7.5 hit enter and well they grew but they didn't really get wide why on Earth did that happen that's because my ratio was not locked let's edit undo the transformation so if I click that up here in the top Corner you're looking for when locked change both width and height by the same proportion so if I click that now I can zoom in change it to 7.5 for the height and now it has made it bigger based on that ratio being locked the width is going to be 6.82 one not that I'm really going to count that far but uh we should have our design there now in order to get get this actually to the machine well this part's a little bit trickier I need to save it as a dxf file that's something that you'll usually see with AutoCAD but I'm going to go to file save as change the type going to go down go down go down see if I can find it there it is dxf and I'm going to give it a name I'm going to call it headphone skull and so that I remember how wide it is or how high I'm going to rate h 7core 5 so I know that the height of it is 7 and2 in or 7.5 in or you know it's it's close to 19 CM but my machine reads inches okay going to press save now it's given me a couple different options here my base unit I'm doing everything in inches let's leave that on inches and let's see what happens when I press okay and Export okay I have my file here it's called headphone skull h75 dxf I'm going to drag this onto my flash drive there we go and now we're going to be turning off the screen recording and walking around to a machine see you in a minute so while I'm waiting for that to boot on here we go we're greeted with my desktop now we're going to be using sheet cam I'm going to go ahead and open that up let that load insert my flash drive there's my file I'm just going to drag it over to a new folder that I've created in my documents I've called it plasma demos because that's what I'm doing today and now I got to figure out what I'm doing with this software well I can go here to New part I'm going to right click press new part and I'm going to find I'm going to find under my documents there it is plasma demos headphone skull click and it's going to ask me a few things well I'm just going to make sure I don't change anything here I want it to go in the bottom left corner of my material so I'm going to press okay wow I've got some uh more than one thing here I wonder what happened so I've walked back to my computer and I realized my layers I still had my original dxf drawing layer so it spat out this plus my thing so I'm not just going to hide it I'm going to click and just delete that delete current layer there we go now let's export this again as we did before file save as export it as a dxf dxf and then we'll transfer it to the other computer all right I've got the new file let's see if that one works better this time all right let's delete that new part open it up there we go new double click same things should pop up press okay okay there there is my drawing this time it's all connected now we need to double check that the size is right so in sheet cam there's a couple things that we can do we can go to options job options and we can actually go and change the height now I believe we said it was 7 and A2 because the total thing was 7.75 so if I go like that there we go I can see that's good now my width I'm just going to leave it at maybe 10 doesn't really matter for this place and the thickness of my material is an e inch or .125 or you can call that about 10 gauge there we go okay press okay now I'm happy with this so far let's go figure out the actual machine so we have a PowerMax 65 plasma cutter that is set up and hooked up to a fast cut Elite Series sorry I'm stepping on metal the fast cut Elite Series icon 4x4 plasma cutter well we need to turn this on all right we have power but currently we have no air well that's strange why is this hissing at me that's better all right we're at 100 that's good so far the front of my machine I'm set to 65 amps there's no weird error code so that's good I can crank this up or down we might as well use a 45 amp but today we're using a 65 amp tip and there's my piece of metal it's pretty long the height of this is 7.75 We Shrunk our so there's going to be a little bit of space on the top and the bottom but now the machine is ready to almost use we need to turn on the table by a button down here wait for that thing to Blink red excellent and when we are going to cut I'm also going to be turning on the ventilation but not yet because that's loud so we have this over here I said 65 amp didn't I that's now where we need to take this dxf drawing and turn it into G-Code so if I go over up here to operation make sure I've got that selected operation plasma cut I'm presented with this menu system I'm going to be doing an outside offset and you can hover over it and it shows you what that is that's where it cuts the inside of your lines well I want the outside and then the inside holes will do their thing I'm going to go to layer and pick the layer of the drawing still has it there fill layer and I have a bunch of different tool options available the one I'm going to be using today is 10 gauge let's find up we want to find 10 gauge 65 amp 125 volts so tool number T6 this is our most used option for 10 gauge steel click that it's already giv me an automatic feed rate because that's programmed into the tool down here there are a bunch of different options and stuff but we're going to leave it on arc Arc and I'm going to do a lead in length of 0.25 well what does that mean let's show you if I press okay it's going to go ahead and generate the paths I didn't get any error codes that's fantastic but if I zoom in on my drawing let's zoom in maybe here on the eyeball well I didn't draw that what is it that's where the plasma cutter is actually going to be going coming around and it's going to start the cut there and then go in do its Loop go all the way around and then it's going to lead out cuz this is waist piece I'm not keeping that you'll also see that on the nose you'll see that looks like oh right here on the outside cut there's another one here for this shape so we're going to be able to follow that along all right last thing before I process if I wanted to I could go up here to this little move tool that cross thing nesting or whatever that is and if I click and drag this around it allows me to move it somewhere else on my piece of metal I kind of want it to be as close as I can to the bottom not overlapping he's eating it no just kind of about there down a little bit line it up yeah that's pretty good so this is going to give me a little bit of space there a tiny bit there a little bit up at the top so this way I know it's going to fit my metal as long as I line my tools up correctly if you remember math class back in school you've got graph paper and the bottom graph would be 0 Z for its XY coordinates we also have Zed which is going to be going in and out but let's get to that after okay we've got our code generated I'm happy there's no error codes I could watch the simulation in here click this and press start this is just kind of fun to do it'll actually show you the path that everything is going to be following for its Cuts there's my final outside cut I have this at 300 time speed not uh the regular 100 and that's done okay cool let's generate this code by going up top here where it says P run the post processor it's going to ask me to Output it I've got all my files here every time I just don't uh delete anything I keep them all headphone skull H 7.5 new tap save now what do I do with that file so here I'm going to open up Mach 3 loader I'm greeted with a screen and something here and Mach 3 which is in our case the fast cut CNC one um this is what is going to control our machine over here now I don't see my drawing so let's load that up I'm going to go to file load gcode and here I'm going to find the code that I made headphone skull H5 h75 new tap click and there it is now this isn't really a drawing it is a combination of code over here or if I scroll down it's just coordinates so if as I'm scrolling you'll see these little white Parts start highlighting on here that's the pathway that it's following based on the G-Code code I used to have to program this by hand and it was ridiculous I love having machines that'll convert it for me okay enough of that nonsense let's rewind like an old VHS tape okay now before I go and do coordinates I want to make sure most of these other things are set up if I scroll down a couple lines in code one of the first thing here it's talking about is my type of tool I'm using 65 amp well I already checked that on the machine 125 volts that didn't have an option on the machine but it has an option here I want to make sure I'm set to 125 uh when I'm using a 45 amp tip I'll usually run it at about 82 but in our case 125 there we go Tweety Bird approved it's showing this is my XY my 0000 well let's see if that's where I want it to be on my actual machine well not really I'm going to go ahead and turn my Motors on it made a clicky noise press press e stop probably for emergency stop now it's green that's good now sometimes this will work by using a controller however I have no batteries today so I'm going to control it with the keyboard I'm going to do up down left right and page up and page down let's see what happens that was left right up down page down page up okay I'm going to go back and forth until this is set up where I want it to all right that's pretty close it's kind of in the bottom corner I don't want to waste material and put it in the middle now is my material set up right it looks pretty straight on here doesn't it well just in case because we're students we want to save as much as we can I'm going to use a ruler here line it up with the edge and pick a spot on my machine so there it looks like it's at just under 9 and 1/2 or 24 cm on the other side what does it say it's at nine so I got to push that okay let's see 9 and A4 9 and a qu that's pretty straight I'm going to line up the tip of my plasma cutter just about there just about a millimeter or two from The Edge I made a little dot I'm going to go back to the computer use the keyboard and move this just above there now every time I press here it moves like that much that's like half a centimeter a/ quar inch I'm going to go to step now it's going to move just that much of an inch that's not very much made some noises go back forth and check it that's pretty darn good good okay let's reset it now to zero back to my page I'm going to press zero all and it makes everything zero good now if I wasn't super confident that this is going to work the first time without testing I can take my mouse go to dry run click and it's going to allow me to do a run with this but without fire in the plasma cutter let's press run it's going to run through the G-Code maybe I should move that whoops and it's going to go through and do the drawing but not actually cut it [Music] [Music] out that looks like it's probably doing the headphone area next cut is going to be the big outside cut I think can be a bunch of little teeth then the big [Music] head maybe not as that's going you can see what part it's cutting out on the screen yeah I guess it was the [Music] outside [Music] finished all right I'm happy with that let's go deselect dry run and now it's actually going to do the cutting double check it's at zero Yep looks good turn on my ventilation make sure that my lungs are going to stay clean and SE my eyeballs and now I can go click run the machine will start its [Music] [Music] thing now as a responsible person I'm going to clean up my mass and turn things off and all that stuff I don't need those for now so that turned out pretty awesome that didn't take me too long since I was working from an existing image already but my next step would probably be you know cleaning up the back anything that needs to get grinded off a little bit of slag some of that can be tweaked in the settings somebody left this a mess anyways uh I would go ahead and do that stuff next so there we have it that was a basic kind of a one way to create your files for a plasma cutter so that turned out pretty cool it almost fits me too but anyways that uh that's a whole another day is doing the cleanup polishing painting maybe adding a hook so you can hang it on a wall whatever but uh thank you so much if you were able to make it through all that I hope some of it was helpful you can take a couple things regardless of which version of inkscape you are using the idea is the same it's all about that big idea and creating something that works for you thank you so much for watching subscribe like leave comments if there's questions I'll do my best to answer them you're all awesome bye

Channel: We Build Stuff

Views: 14,155

Keywords: CNC, plasma cutting, inkscape, high school, shop class, ADST, tech ed, michael holbrook, teacher, teaching, student, fire, welding, metalwork, photo editing, diy, design

Id: -QOLV8C-6tM

Length: 35min 10sec (2110 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 24 2023