XTOOL Creative Space 2.0 Getting Started, New Features, Plus LED Edge Lit Acrylic Signs With The P2

[Music] I recently got the xtool P2 and normally when I get a new machine I spend a lot of time making a very thorough getting started video for you guys covering a lot of different material examples as well as a general overall review and that video for the P2 is still coming however xtool also recently released the 2.0 version of their creative space software so I want to take this opportunity to get you guys familiar with the new release as well as many of its new features and at the same time show you guys some of the clear acrylic projects that I've been working on with the P2 so let's get started at the time of this video recording xtool creative space 2.0 is in Beta release and they've got a whole bunch of new features such as integration with their easy set material Library they've also optimized the tool path planning as well as making it possible to control more than one xtool machine at once on top of that you can also edit Vector path directly in xtool Creative space and of course AI is a big thing now so there's AI generative models in Creative space 2.0 and some really cool snapshot previews for the S1 machine as time goes on I'm sure they'll add even more features but in this video we'll touch on a few of them we'll start off with an example using the xtool P2 and some 3 mm or roughly 1/8 in thick clear acrylic this is actually one of the two 12 in x 12 in Sample sheets that comes with the P2 and although the P2 can pretty easily compensate for materials put in there at any angle I do my best to square up these sheets with the frame when we first open creative space 2.0 things will still look a little familiar we can start a new project by pressing the new project button in the top right hand corner of the screen and then I've got my P2 connected over USB so on the right hand side we can connect our device up at the top you'll notice the name of the connected machine and if you click on this it opens a drop- down menu which I like to refer to as the device management section right now I only have the P2 connected so that's the only one you'll see and on the right hand side I'm going to refresh the P2 camera and you'll see that piece of clear acrylic that I've got in the workspace on the right side of the interface you'll still find things like the laser mode in this case I've got it set to Flat because I have a flat workpiece and in the top leftand Corner if you click on the X Tool logo you still get your typical menu where you can save your project open a new project or you can select file and import image and bring in a graphic of your choice and in this case I've brought in an SVG Vector file of a Corvette with the graphics selected on the right hand side this is where you'll find all of the properties such as the engraving cutting or scoring settings as well as its dimensions and position and rotation inside of the workspace I'll touch on the material easy set panel later in the video but for now I'm just going to click off of the graphic and I'm going to set the global material settings to transparent acrylic the thickness at 3 mm and because I know the thickness I don't need to autofocus it and when I click back on the graphic you can see that it has inherited the global material settings so engraving for transparent acrylic will be 15% power at 500 mm/s on the X tool P2 in the bottom left corner you'll find a small icon that looks like a bunch of layers and not surprisingly that will open up the layer and object list in the left hand side you'll find tools to create text as well as shapes and I'll be creating a rectangle I'm going to be using this rectangle to cut the acrylic and currently this 12in x 12in sheet that's roughly 300 mm x 300 mm I want to cut it down to 300X 200 mm therefore with my rectangle selected on the right hand side I can change those height and width properties and with the little link button I can lock or unlock that aspect ratio of this rectangle now I'm going to set the width to 310 mm because I don't want to trim this sheet so I'm going to overshoot those two edges on the left and right hand side and finally for the rectangle can change the processing type to cut I'm also going to position the bottom edge of my rectangle ever so slightly below the bottom edge of the acrylic so that won't get cut either then I can grab my Vector graphic and I can size it inside of that rectangle and X tool creative space will still snap that graphic to the center points of my rectangle so that's a pretty quick and painless setup and if you've used creative space before the 2.0 release most of this will still look pretty familiar to you and you should be able to navigate your way around the new interface top right hand corner we can click on process and then we get our preview of our job in the bottom left corner you'll see an estimated time for the job and you can also see the tool path planning for the job we'll get the job underway on the P2 and I apologize in advance for the video quality while the P2 is working it's a really big machine and it would not fit in my typical filming space so I'm still trying to figure out the best lighting for filming the P2 in progress either way you can see the engraving portion is done and the through cut operation is last and the P2 doesn't even break a sweat while cutting through this 3mm acrylic while you've been watching this job get processed you might be wondering if my camera is out of focus or if it's the Engraving that looks a little blurry and it's the engraving but not to worry it's not the quality of the engraving it's just the residue or deposit from the acrylic that's been burned off and it's just sitting on top of that surface so it needs to be cleaned I personally clean this fine powder off with a wet microfiber cloth just water and I make sure that I don't press hard so you don't scratch the acrylic surface with a P2 I've never found it necessary to clean with any chemicals as none of that powder has ever bonded to the surface the end result is a really nice sharp looking engraving and now that we have a beautifully engraved acrylic panel we need to do something with that and so what I've done is put together an acrylic LED EDG lit stand kit which includes a power supply an inline switch as well as these led Shields which slip over top of the LED bar so you won't see the lights directly the whole thing is super easy to assemble there's no Hardware these shields simply slide over the LED bar and they're going to ensure that you don't get any glare into your eyes from the LED bar the LED bar has got a high quality black aluminum frame as well as a nice daylight color temperature the kit also comes with these two stand feet and you can see there's cutouts which will get aligned to the back of the bar and we can take our Barrel jack connectors slip them through the holes and the stand feet will get pressed on on to the ends of the LED bar they're reasonably tight fit so obviously they won't fall off so I find it's easiest to start with one side and get it partially seated then with the one side most of the way on you can install the right hand side in the same manner you'll push the barrel Jack connector through the center hole and then press fit the right hand side foot in place and once both sides are partially on it's easiest now to squeeze from both sides as you can push push in opposite directions to get them fully seated now we can look at the left hand side of the bar and there's a cutout at the back of the foot and this both acts as a strain relief as well as an opportunity to hide the barrel Jack connector on the left hand side the reason there is a connector on that side is because you can daisy chain these led sign kits together on the right hand side you can do the same thing with that wire and connector and then you can direct the wiring behind the frame to hide it now I'll take the extension harness with the inline switch and I'll plug it into the LED bar and these Barrel jack connectors are twist lock connectors so they won't easily pull apart I really like these because they prevent accidental disconnection of the barrel jack connectors then we can do the same thing with the power supply end and we can go ahead and plug that in and when we flip the switch as You' expect the LED bar comes to life the stand kit works best with panels that are 3 mm or roughly 1/8 in thick and the panels just slide into the groove and sit upright if your sign or graphic is being displayed in front of a busy background and you want to eliminate that distraction I designed a second slot into the stand which will accommodate another 3mm acrylic panel that you can use as a backdrop and this is where you can get really creative with colors and textures in this case I'm using this glitter blue acrylic sheet to make this look sort of like a blueprint but I've also experimented with mirrored acrylic and if you use mirrored acrylic you'll get that infinity mirror look and it's super cool switching out your panels is also really easy as you can just lift the old one out and place the new one in again there's no Hardware required here ideally you want to use panels that are about 300 mm or 12 in wide but the height is up to you whatever you choose to do the LED bar has a really effective diffused lens so the lighting effect across your graphic is very uniform so you don't get that undesirable look where you can see the individual discret LEDs if you guys are interested in these kits head on over to my website embrac making.com it's a great way to support this channel while getting something awesome and useful in return now it's time to get back to work in xtool Creative space because I've got more cool features to show you I've already gone ahead and imported a Tesla cybertruck graphic into our first project but up at the top there's a plus button where you can start a new project the project will default to the currently connected machine so you'll see the P2 preview come up here again but if I go ahead and click on this device management Tab and click on devices available you'll see that I also have an X tool F1 connected over Wi-Fi if I select the X tool F1 it's going to warn me that the current project properties are going to change over to the F1 and you can see that the workspace in the background has changed so this is how the new Multi-Device management works and we're going to be processing something on the P2 at the same time as the F1 we're going to be doing one of these aluminum wallets I've set up the aluminum wallet in one of my F1 fixures which you can also find on my website embrac making.com and then back in xtool Creative space I'm going to import the template for this fixture I'm not going to resize this graphic and I'm going to check the button on the right hand side such that the template doesn't get output then I can import the graphic that I actually want on the wallet and I can use the properties on the right hand side to rotate the image 90° now I can use my template in the background to take my graphic and snap it to the center and you can see how it's placed inside of the area where the wallet will be sitting in the physical fixture with the graphics selected on the right hand side in the material drop down settings you can see that creative space 2.0 actually imported some of my older presets but I'm going to change this over to the IR laser with a 150 microc dot duration 60% power and 700 DPI if you guys happen to have an X tool F1 I've got an entire in-depth video that you guys can find on my channel using the tabs at the top of the screen I can switch the project back to the cybertruck and this is going to bring us back to the P2 workspace and I'm not going to run through these settings because they're the exact same as the Corvette engraving and cutting that we had done previously so I'm just going to process this job and get it started because the main thing that I want to show you here is that while this job is running in the top leftand Corner we can now minimize the screen and in the device management tab in the top Center you'll see that P2 is now in yellow meaning that it's processing a job and in the top right hand corner you can see which jobs are in progress by clicking the little button that looks like a bunch of sheets using the tabs at the top of the screen I can now switch back to the F1 project it was called Untitled because I hadn't yet saved it but I can get this job started and then again in the top left hand corner of the screen I can press the minimize button and return back to the project workspace where the F1 logo is now in yellow cuz it's processing now I have two jobs running simultaneously on two different machines and in that processing menu you can see how much time is left for each job I think this has been a highly anticipated and sought after feature for people running businesses I see a lot of people online with multiple xtool machines and this will definitely increase your efficiency and improve your workflow after a few minutes the one side of my aluminum wallet is now complete and I can just simply flip this wallet over inside of the fixture and I'm ready to process the other side in Creative space 2.0 you get a prompt telling you that your one job is done you can see that it's been removed from the inprocessing list and now I'm back inside of my F1 project I'm going to import the other graphic which is the front side of my wallet overlay it on top top of the template delete the old graphic use the same settings as I used on the other side of the wallet hit process and while all of this is happening the engraving is still happening on the P2 so this is just a good example how you can start stop and manage other jobs while you have work going on on other machines I personally found this process pretty seamless and fairly intuitive to figure out how it works without any sort of existing video guide and the Beta release of xtool creative space 2.0 has been really stable for me while this second job is going on we can hop back into creative space see how much time is left on the Cyber trck engraving and you can see that the wallets are obviously smaller jobs so they're done much quicker I've had this F1 for quite some time now and I love using it for these small work pieces because the machine is so compact it just nicely fits on top of my desk in contrast the P2 is a much larger machine with the CO2 laser so clearly the two machines will have very different use cases but it's really nice that they can now be controlled from one computer with one instance of the software at the same time now with the Cyber truck engraving and cutting done on that 3mm piece of cast acrylic we can take a look at the details and again I'm not surprised here how well everything turned out on the xtool P2 one thing to keep in mind is that a nice clean digital graphic will also help produce a nice clean output it's kind of like garbage in garbage out these example Graphics were Vector traces so the quality was reasonable but I'm confident I could get even better results if I had created these vector graphics from scratch and had perfectly clean path lines regardless I think they turned out really nice and I can think of a few personal technical drawings that I'm going to be putting on display in my office using this method now if you're not into cars or technical drawings we can explore a different theme and I've got some City skylines here these are r images and right in X tool creative space we can select our graphic click edit image and using the magic wand I can erase the white background I can use the crop tool to crop the rest of the image that I'm not interested in and then I can resize it and I'm going to be resizing these Graphics to fit on the offcuts from our previous projects I'd cropped out the original text from this image so I'm going to use the text tool on the left hand side to now write the city name back in so we've got New York and I'm going to place that in the top right hand corner of the image and as you would expect with the text selected you can change the font as well as the font size and then I'm going to bring in another city skyline here and again do the same process where I'm erasing the white background and using the crop tool to erase anything that I'm not interested in on the right hand side I can unlink the height width aspect ratio so that I can distort the image a little bit so that it fits Within These offcuts I can go back and forth as many times as I need to edit each of these images to erase the white space in the image and crop out any other aspects of the graphic that I'm not interested in now you don't technically need to erase any of the white space as it will be ignored in the job it's only going to engrave those black lines but I just find it easier to see the workpiece behind it and position the graphics in the job preview we've got multiple Design Elements and here you you can see more of these red lines indicating the optimized tool path to reduce the processing time and I would imagine the more elements that you have the more effective this feature would be in Saving you time I'll spare you guys from watching the P2 go back and forth engraving all of these lines and we'll cut to the Chase and look at the final result of these City skyline Graphics I think they look really sharp with my LED EDG lit stand kit and if you've got a favorite iconic City skyline I'm sure you can imagine how great it would look lit up in acrylic now the last thing I want to touch on in the new xtool creative space 2.0 is the material easys set panel in the material drop down list on the right hand side if you can't find the material that you're looking for hit that more button at the bottom and right inside of your project tab inside of xtool creative space you're going to be taking to the material settings portion of the xtool website where you can search for your material so I'm just going to type in acrylic and I'm going to get a list of all of the different types of acrylic that are offered with the xtool material so I'm going to find this blue glitter opaque glossy acrylic sheet and that's what I've got loaded up in the P2 then you can select the processing type and you can see that it already knows that I'm working with the P2 so it's already filled out the Machine model and the laser power and it's going to tell me what the power and speed settings should be for that processing type but it gets even better because if you look at the image on the left hand side what you can see is essentially a material test card you can hover over and click on each of the elements in the material test card to get those power and speed settings for that effect the variation is even more evident when you select the processing type as engrave and they have a library of these test cards for all of the X tool supported materials but the best part here is that you don't need to remember these you can just click that green button open in in XCS and those settings will get imported into your project you can see the material has now changed to the blue opaque glitter glossy sheet and the vector rectangle that I had drawn in this project which was set to cut is going to inherent those cut properties this just adds another level of convenience efficiency and ease of use within xtool creative space after using the X tool machines for some time now I've noticed that their Library settings have become a lot more accurate so they must have spent a lot of time testing and working on those that's it for this video I'm excited to keep working with the P2 and I've got that deep dive video on this machine coming out in the near future in the meantime I hope this was a good introduction into working with the brand new xtool creative space 2.0 software be sure to check out my website embrace.com where you'll find that acrylic LED stand kit that I talked about earlier in this video and you'll find upgrades and accessories for all of the xtool machines I've got stuff for the D1 Pro F1 S1 and now the P2 thank you guys so much for watching hope to see you guys in the next [Music] video

Channel: Embrace Making

Views: 6,180

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Id: 0-O1X-yZ8ts

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2024