XTool S1 In Depth Review and Setup Guide, Material Settings, Upgrades, Fixtures, and More!

[Music] today we're going in depth with the xtool S1 now I was one of the lucky few who has sent the S1 pre-release and unlike some other people on YouTube I decided to spend a lot more time with this machine to make a video with a ton of details instead of just publishing something right on the machine release date to take advantage of the YouTube algorithm and for those of you not familiar with the S1 it's the latest laser engraver in released by X tool which places a high priority on safety so for example we have this large laser safe viewing window right at the front and it's got a door switch on it so when you lift that up the machine won't run which will of course protect your eyes as well as your skin it also features an array of flame detection sensors on the inside and the Machine is compatible with their ecosystem of other safety devices such as their fire suppression set now all of that safety does not come at the sacrifice of performance this S1 is equipped with a 40 W blue diode laser module and those laser heads are interchangeable so you can swap it out for their IR module as well as their 20 W blue dial Laser module and the S1 also has other amazing features like Dynamic autofocus so you can engrave curved surfaces and it's compatible with their conveyor feed system and so I'll be walking you guys through the machine setup and taking you through all of the intricate details of getting the S1 working with the xtool creative space software I've got a ton of material examples for you guys and as always I share all of my machine settings for those materials plus I've got some exclusive upgrades and accessories and lastly I just want to say thank you to xtool for sending me the S1 and we've got a lot to cover in this video so let's get started well begin with the unboxing with which X tool never seems to disappoint and the S1 is no different the S1 is a fairly large machine so it looks like they took every precaution necessary to make sure that the machine gets to you in one piece after removing the very large velcro straps and protective foam covering we can get on to removing all the plastic protective covering it would be very disappointing if that very large Green Tinted viewing window at the front of the machine came scratched or cracked and it looks like in this case mine arrived in perfect condition under the front window we get the beautifully branded and packaged xtool instruction manual and material sample pack and again the presentation here is excellent and all the additional accessories are neatly and safely tucked away underneath inside of the machine frame and so this is where you'll find the exhaust hose an accessory box a long skinny box holding the material support prisms a bunch of extra foam where you'll find the power supply tucked away inside and the power supply cable as well as the 40 W blue diode laser module head and as we put our accessories aside to get ready for the assembly we can just take a moment here to appreciate how sleek and sexy this machine is I really like this color scheme with the satin black panels gloss black lettering combined with the green viewing window and green accents on this machine I really got to hand it to whoever's in charge of the appearance of the xtool products you've done a really nice job and so as I alluded to earlier inside one of the green packages is the material sample pack and in the other one is the very nicely detailed instruction manual now if you're watching maybe you prefer video instructions but X tool always does a very nice job with their printed manuals now we can move on to the setup and assembly and the S1 isn't too much work to get started so you're going to open up the black box where you'll find the tool kit X tool keeps things as simple as possible with a single tool to assemble your machine you'll see these yellow stickers here on the left and right hand side and they're pointing to these small rubber bumpers which keep the Gantry from moving around while shipping each side left and right has two screws to be removed and once you remove them you can pull the entire Gantry forwards then we can remove our laser module from the bag and on the left hand side you'll find a connector receptacle and we'll be connecting this to the dangling wiring harness on the left hand side of the carriage now the connector is keyed so you can't put it in backwards just insert it and then take the air assist tube and put it over the fitting right beside that receptacle at the back of the module you'll find this standoff looking feature and that's going to slot into the hole in the carriage line up the Peg and the slotted hole push the laser module into the carriage and then push down the module is on Springs so you'll likely compress the Springs like I did there but it should lock in place and then from your Hardware kit you can use the two M3 by8 socket head cap screws to secure the laser module now we can grab our focusing probe and it magnetically attaches to the side of the laser module does a nice job of self-locating so you can put it on the side of the module and the magnets will take care of the rest now at the back of the machine there is this vent and it's got four M3 by8 socket head cap screws holding it in place unless you're using your S1 outside you're likely going to want to use a hose to relocate the smoke and fumes out of your workspace now obviously the 3-in hose from X tool will fit directly on the back but I also make an adapter to fit the more common 4in Dyer duct style hose you can find this adapter on my website embrac making.com and the reason that I would personally go with the 4-in hose is that it comes in very long lengths at a pretty affordable price and if your window or door that you're routing your exhaust out of is a very long distance away you can use one of those 4in inline duct fans I'll put a link to one of those in the video description down below to pull the smoke and fumes through many feet of that 4in hose now if you don't have a window or door nearby a good solution here is to use the xtool hose and hook it up to their fume and smoke purifier this one is their larger floor mounted model and maybe I was just missing something but I couldn't get the S1 hose to hook up to any of the adapters and so again I made my own and of course I'll make it available to you on my website and at the back of the smoke and fume purifier there is an exhaust port and even though the air coming out of that would be filtered some of you may have a very sensitive nose and you may want to route that outside of a window or door so I have a 3in to 4in hose adapter for that as well you can find links to everything I just described in the video description down below while we're at the back of the S1 you can find the other various connectors and ports as well as the power switch now the bottom USB port is for the key and you can think of this like a lockout switch the machine won't run without it above that is the input power and between the USB key and the input power is your USB connection to your computer X tool includes a USB C cable with a right angle connector which is quite nice because it routes it out to the side of the machine and then of course you can place your computer or laptop beside your S1 on the right hand side are the push fit connectors for the air assist which is on the top and the fire safety set which is on the bottom they made the ports different sizes so you can't mix up the two but the hoses are the same size and adapter doesn't seem to be included so for now I'm not going to hook up the fire safety set and on the top Port I'm going to hook up the air assist inside your workspace you can support your work pieces with these prism material risers which are included with the machine and you can just set them down on the bottom of the S1 and then place your workpiece on top lifting your material is good practice for through cuts and those prisms kind of just sit there but I do have a good solution for arranging them if you keep watching later in the upgrade section of this video now if you bought the S1 and you got yourself the basic kit it includes the air assist as well as this honeycomb panel after placing it inside of the machine you'll want to push it all the way to the right and to the back now it does work a lot better than those little prisms but it's also a lot taller so you do lose some height you can only process thinner materials when using this honeycomb panel X tool does offer a riser base to get more depth inside your machine but they didn't send me one so I can't really show you that now we're ready to fire up our S1 for the very first time with the switch at the back and if it doesn't immediately turn on twist the Red emergency stop button at the right hand side of the machine counterclock wise the lights should turn on the laser head will move and the button at the front of the machine will illuminate anytime I test a new machine I like to start with a very simple wood engraving so we're going to be using one of these Basswood sheets that comes in the material sample kit now the S1 is compatible with lightburn but I will be using the xtool creative space software I find it easier to use plus they're constantly updating it and we are after all testing an xtool product so we might as well use their software and the first time you connect it to the S1 you'll probably be prompted to update the firmware this can take a few minutes so be very patient do not turn off the machine during this process even if it looks like nothing is happening the button at the front of the machine may be flashing white and purple and during this process you may also see the Gantry and Laser head move around a little bit this is completely normal and eventually you'll get a message saying the firmware update succeeded now depending on whether or not You' used other xtool products you may notice something a little different here and there's a red crosshairs here on the screen in the xtool creative space software and that represents the position of the laser head and this is not something that you would see on machines like the D1 Pro and so what I've done here is I've imported a raster image and this is just going to be a grayscale engraving test that we're going to run on the right hand side I've pre-selected the material as the 3mm Basswood preset and then I tried clicking the distance button to autofocus the laser head but I just want to show you guys that when the laser module is way off to the left hand side it's out of the range where it can actually take a measurement and so with my hand I manually drag the laser head over to the bottom left hand corner of the material and you can see the red Crosshair is moving there and then in X tool creative space if I go ahead and click the distance measurement button the S1 will then probe that point on the material and focus the laser to the top of that surface after the S1 probes a surface it's normal for the laser head to travel to the back of the machine to reset the probe now the next thing we can do is tell the software where our material is and how big it is using the two-point positioning system so on the right hand side there's a button that says start marking we're going to click that and this will bring up a screen that's going to give us some basic instructions on how to Mark our material it first wants us to line up the laser crosshairs with the top leftand corner corner of our material and now you don't have to go right to the edge of the material if you don't want to you can place laser crosshairs somewhere on the inside of your material and in this case I'm going to do that because I don't want to laser over top of those magnetic material hold down clips that I'm using on the honeycomb bed and so I'll go ahead and position the crosshairs close but not over top of those clips and I'll press the button on the front of the machine and in the software you'll see that that point has now been recorded now we need to move the crosshairs to the bottom right hand corner of the material or at least the space that we want to laser within again I'm not going to go right to the bottom of the material I'll get close to that clip but I won't go over top of it once I'm happy with that position I'll press the button which is lit up blue on the front of the machine and the software will record that second point and then we can go ahead and click the done button and once we click the done button you'll see a green bounding box show up on the workspace here here in X2 creative space and this is now where you can drag and resize your image to fit inside of that green box once you're happy with the size and position you can click the framing button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and then when you're ready you press the button on the front of the X tool S1 and the laser crosshairs will frame the position of exactly where you put that image you may also notice that during framing the laser module moves up and down in the Zed axis as well now that we're finished framing if you click on the image you can adjust some of the power and speed settings and so I'm going to bump up the power to 30% and I'm going to leave this speed at 200 mm/s and I'm going to leave this in grayscale mode now the reason I'm increasing the power from the X tool presets is that I've already done one or two Engravings on this machine and they looked a little washed out and too light for my liking so by increasing the power we'll get a bit of a darker Engraving I've said this in some of my other videos but don't be afraid to deviate from some of the xtool reference settings some of them are spoton While others are actually way off now in order to start the job we still have to press start at the top right hand corner of the screen and don't forget to close the lid on the S1 because it does have a safety switch on the lid and so if you don't close it you end up with an error warning you that the front lid is open from what I understand the s in S1 stands for safety and so if you're going to be using this machine without safety glasses they want to make sure that that front lid is closed while the laser is activated based on the packages available on the xtool website it looks like I was sent the basic kit which included that honeycomb bed as well as the xtool air assist this is a smart air assist module which connects to the S1 with a USB cable at the back of the machine and in the auto mode it allows the controller on the S1 to modulate the air assist according to the job being processed for this engraving job I'll put the air assist in auto mode and I'll clear that error from the lid I'll restart the job press the button on the front of the S1 and the engraving process will start this job took roughly 14 minutes at 200 mm/s now the machine can go faster and if I had set it to a faster speed I would have increased the power a little more but at this point I'm not looking to test the speed I'm more interested in the range of light to dark and that's why I have this grayscale test here and so when I flip the board over that was the xtool preset at 25% which I thought was a bit too light and so on this side is the 30% power at 200 mm per second which I was much happier with I'm going to be using those same settings on this circular piece of wood and I've gone ahead and probe the surface and now when it comes to the two-point positioning on a circle you can try and line up the crosshairs with the corners of an imaginary box drawn around that Circle but what I find is a little bit easier is to just grab two points on the diameter of the circle with a circle it's still a little tricky because you will still have to eyeball it and make sure you're getting the diameter but instead of a box you'll just end up with a line the green line represents the circle's diameter and so I can bring in my image and I can resize it to sort of fit within the diameter of the circle and now my image went centered across that line should fit within the circle now this is just a simple black and white image so on the right hand side in the settings under bitmap mode I changed that to Jarvis instead of grayscale and again I'm using 30% power at 200 mm per second when framing the object you'll see that it overshot the circle a little bit and that's only because of the white space around the embrac making logo this job here took about 7 minutes but again we could drastically reduce that time I'm just trying to give you guys a good starting point in terms of these settings for Engraving something like this common Basswood the engraving looks really sharp and consistent I do not see any scan lines and there are no charring or burn marks around the engraving and keep in mind here that this circle was cut out on a different machine so the charring around the edges of the circle were produced by something other than the S1 next we're going to engrave this bamboo cutting board and I've used the laser crosshairs to square it up inside the machine I've also gone ahead and used the two-point positioning system to grab the opposite corners and you can see that green box here representing the size of the bamboo cutting board for this job here I want to show you guys what not to do so you don't waste a ton of time like I did with this very inefficient method of Engraving this image that I've imported is just a black and white raster image so when I click on it and we go to change some of the settings again I'll switch over to Jarvis now this is on bamboo so to get a darker engrave I had to Jack the power up to 50% I'm going to going to leave the speed at 200 but the mistake that I've made here that I want to point out is that I'm using a raster image for a job like this where I'm using most of the work area and most of this image is empty white space when the S1 goes to process this job it's going to scan over all of that white area therefore this job which should only take a few minutes at most will take over an hour to complete it would have been way more efficient to either import the vector files and do this or take that raster image and trace it using the xtool creative space software and we'll go through that in an upcoming chapter of this video now we're going to set up a through cut and we're going to be using that same bamboo cutting board that I just engraved on top of now I've imported these Vector circles here and I'm going to be placing them in the middle of the board with both circles selected on the right hand side you can see the processing type is set as cut power I'm going to set to 95 and speed at 3 mm/s now this board is about 15 mm thick so ideally I'd like to set the focus 8 mm lower than the top surface and in the settings on the right hand side you can offset the focus so it says lower the focus but the maximum you can go is 6 mm and so I'm going to lower the focus 6 mm into the wood I'm also going to take the air assist off of Auto and I'm going to set it to Max I've seen videos of people cutting through wood at least this thick sometimes in one pass or even two or three at most but me personally I've never been able to accomplish this maybe it's the wood I'm using in other videos I've tried plywood in this video with the S1 I'm trying bamboo but the result is always fire at that slow speed it's just way too much heat in a small area now I could increase the speed which would require me to do more passes and that approach worked for me on the 40 W module on the D1 Pro but quite frankly I just don't have the patience to do 10 to 15 passes to get through a piece of wood there are much more efficient ways to cut through wood and so while it is possible it just doesn't seem like the most efficient way to cut through thick work pieces that being said I'm always open to learning something new so if you guys have any suggestions for me or if I'm just using the wrong materials for this please let me know in the comment section down below now cutting through thinner materials is a lot less tricky what I have here is some 3mm Basswood which should be very easy for us to get through this material we'll go through the typical workflow so we'll start by probing the surface and then we'll take the two points and in this case I'm going to use my diameter method that I showed you earlier so our green bounding box is just a line now I've got my raster image that I've imported and I'm going to use the trace function in order to get a vector outline it might be a little difficult to see but the blue Vector outline is selected and I've selected cut as the processing type and in the material selection I've selected 3 mm Basswood Now power for this preset is 100 speed is 25 so I'm going to do reduce the power to 95 but I'm also going to reduce the speed pretty significantly down to 20 mm/s I'm going to lower the focus 1 mm into the wood ideally I would have liked to have selected 1.5 mm but it only seems to allow me to put in whole numbers now when I click on process in the preview window I still see the black section of the raster image so this doesn't seem right and so you can see if I click on the white area the raster image is still visible so even though I've traced it it didn't get of that so I've clicked on the raster image I've clicked on ignore and now when I go to process it's just the outline and this is exactly what I'm looking for because I'm looking to cut out the logo and not engrave it now usually when you get a nice clean cut and you go to pick up your workpiece all of the inner parts fall out and if you look at the back of this piece you can still see that these inner parts are still connected now if I press on some of them some of them will come out pretty easy but other ones will get stuck and leave a nasty tear out so what I've done is I've brought in the original piece here that we engraved in the previous chapter of this video I'm going to try and align the graphic onto that piece and I'm going to try and cut out the engrave section so in this case I've left the power at 955 and I've reduced the speed even more to 15 mm per second and this should result in a nice clean through cut it seems like with some of the X tool reference settings they've overestimated the power of their laser modules and in some cases you have to bump up the power or reduce the speed to get a nice clean result like this but when you do get it right it is very good these Cuts have zero Charing around the edges the dark little Shadows that you may see there are from the original engrave sections but otherwise this was a perfect cut scoring is a topic I don't see frequently covered and if you're not familiar scoring is just a cut that doesn't go all the way through and because it doesn't go all the way through you can kind of think of it as a deeper engrave and so I brought back the bamboo cutting board squared it up probed the surface and use the two-point measuring system I brought in another raster image and I'm use the trace feature to vectorize it and that way we can use the score feature because as a raster you can only select engrave earlier in the video I had another example where I had a raster image with a lot of white space and it took a really long time to process that and so by vectorizing it and using score all of these blue lines that are traced around the black parts of the image the S1 will basically Trace those lines out and give me the same effect as an engrave but just along the blue lines if you're using the trace function to score or engrave you're going to want to zoom in into those blue lines and use the sliders in the trace feature there to make sure none of your blue lines are overlapping like I did now I can drag and reposition the vector result into my bounding box and I can select the old roster image in the background and delete it and whether it's a vector or raster image with the object selected you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to make fine adjustments to the position over on the rightand side I've made sure I've selected score I've set the power to 35% and the speed to 200 mm/s when using score you'll notice that there's no bitmap mode options so no grayscale Jarvis and that sort of thing and that's because scoring is a lot like cutting and less like engraving and I've been using it to have the laser Trace out all of those hexagons without going over any of the white space in the image saving me a ton of time and I'll be able to get a nice dark engrave on this bamboo and so while the s1's running you'll notice it's not scanning left to right and it's gone ahead and like I said traced over all of those hexagons following the lines but unlik a through cut I've only marked the surface and it took me a fraction of the time as if I had used the engrave feature now if I want those hexagons a little darker I'm going to rerun this to a second pass I've left the power setting the same and I've reduced the speed to 150 mm/s the result will now be darker lines and another trick here to get thicker lines if that's what you are after would be to autofocus the laser a few millimeters above the surface and now the laser beam will be out of focus it'll be larger and it will leave wider lines when you run it over that surface in my case I wanted my lines to be a bit thinner and I was very happy with this result after spending some extra time with the X tool S1 I found a handful of things slightly annoying and I set out to improve them the first thing I made was this button cover and if you guys follow my videos I've made something very similar for the xtool D1 and that's because the S1 and the D1 both have these buttons that sit proud of the panel that they're mounted to and the problem with this is that it's very easy to accidentally press these buttons the S one is a pretty deep machine at about 22 in or 560 mm and so when you go to put it on a table the front of the machine will be sitting pretty much right at the end of a table if it's about 2 ft in depth 24 in and so I can't tell you how many times my leg or hip has accidentally pressed that button while I've been adjusting things inside of the machine on the D1 Pro the button is on the top of the frame and you could actually accidentally start the laser with your hands in the machine on the S1 the laser won't start with the lid up so at least it's not a safety concern but it is really annoying because it will throw the machine into airor and then you have to reset it before you start your job again you can find the cover on my website embrac making.com and it attaches with some double-sided tape which is included with the cover and the nice thing about the cover is that it does not block the LED ring light inside so you can still see those colors very clearly and the last thing I like about having a cover is that kids or pets won't accidentally press the button as well with the cover on the next thing I found annoying were these material prism holders and while I appreciate X tool includes them with the S1 they tend to slide a lot along the bottom base and in fact they're so easy to slide and move around that in this clip here you can see that the air assist actually moves them on that large piece of bamboo it wasn't such a big deal but if you're using a smaller workpiece when those prisms move your workpiece will also move in the middle of a job and it's clearly going to ruin the result to address this I've designed these prism holders that interlock with one another and the pris prisms sit in the grooves on the top these will keep the prisms from moving around plus it makes them much easier to align so you get a nice even spacing between all of those prisms now they are made of plastic so you will want to avoid cutting directly over top of them position your workpiece somewhere in the middle but if you do happen to catch one they are just made of a corn-based plastic so there is no PVC or ABS the other nice thing about these holders is that the prisms can be spaced closer together to fit smaller work pieces on there so they don't fall through the button cover and the prism holders are sold together as a kit on my website embrace making.com the next thing I want to talk about is fixtures because I love using fixtures to increase efficiency and the accuracy of my work I've got these round fake leather patches from the xtool selected materials and what's cool about these is that when you laser them they turn silver there's also no PVC in them so they're laser safe but the annoying thing here is that they're Round And as as I showed you guys earlier in the video the two-point positioning system is not the best for round objects so let's take our round object and turn it into a square now instead of trying to eyeball an imaginary box around your circular object we can use the laser crosshairs to grab the real corners of this fixture then we can use a template in X tool creative space to position our image very accurately on top of our circular object for rectangular square and irregular-shaped objects I do have another fixture and this is a 9 in1 jig that holds various different materials you can hold things like the xtool pendants metal USB thumb drives military tags metal business cards these xtool leather patches aluminum wallets like this red one here amongst other things like Square coasters I originally designed these fixtures for the xtool F1 but I found that they worked beautifully inside of the S1 as well on the X tool F1 it's a small machine and you can only put in one fixture at a time but the nice thing about the S1 and its much larger processing area is you can take multiple fixtures and you can panelize them unlike the more expensive xtool P2 the S1 doesn't have a camera for positioning objects inside of the work area we can get around that by using fixtures to accurately position multiple objects all at once and increase efficiency so we'll run an example here with these aluminum wallets we'll Begin by putting our laser module somewhere near the top leftand corner and our two fixtures are placed side by side touching one another now I'm going to take this square and I'm going to square up our fixtures with respect to the machine frame you can use the flat face on the right hand side of the inner tub of the X tool S1 now the bottom does have a little bit of a round Edge so you'll want to move your square up over top of that round Edge so you're catching the nice flat face once our square is in position we can slide it up against the front edge of the fixtures and we to make sure that both of them are touching the square and now those two fixtures should be squared up inside of our machine perfectly you can slide your Gantry back and forth along the X and Y AIS just to make sure that the laser crosshairs lines up perfectly with those edges it's just a way of double-checking that your fixtures are square now we're ready to set the focus to the top of the aluminum wallet so I'll drag the laser module over top of one of those wallets and I'll use the software to initiate the autofocus then we'll use the two-point positioning and set our first point to the top left corner of our leftmost fixture the next corner to Mark will be the bottom right hand corner of the rightmost fixture and you'll see when I do this I'm moving one axis at a time so I'm moving the Y down and the X to the right try not to move both at once and you'll find that you'll get a much more accurate result this will produce a bounding box that fits around both of the fixtures the next step is to import the templates and if you you've ordered these fixtures from my website you'll have the templates automatically emailed to you after you place your order I'm going to take the first template and I'm going to align it with the bounding box to the left hand side and so three of the edges of the template will align with the green edges that make up our bounding box from the twoo measuring system over on the right hand side I'm going to click on ignore so that these templates don't get processed I'm going to copy it and I'm going to paste it and when I go go ahead and paste it and inherits the properties of the first one so it will automatically be ignored and now I'm going to align the second template with the right top and bottom edges of the two-point positioning and just a reminder you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to make fine adjustments to the position of those templates and now our templates on our screen represent our fixtures in physical space inside of the machine I've now brought in a raster image of the X Tool logo and I've moved it to the second layer inside of X tool creative space now I can zoom in and position this image over top of the area of the fixture that reads aluminum wallet that's because of course we're processing aluminum wallets I'm using the arrow keys on the keyboard to slightly nudge the position of the logo around and then on the right hand side you can see it's already set to engrave I'm going to set the power to 13% I'm going to leave the speed at 80 mm/s I'm going to save this setting as aluminum wallet now these settings worked very nicely for me with the 40 W module on the D1 Pro and so I'm going to go ahead and assume that for the 40 W module on the S1 these should also work nicely I've brought in a second logo which is the YouTube logo and again I'm placing it on Layer Two the same as the X Tool logo I'll position this one over the right hand side template and again I can use the arrows on the keyboard or I can click on the image and I can use the text fields on the top to move the position of this image exactly where I need it to be on the right hand side we're setting it to engrave and because we had saved our previous settings I can just select aluminum wallet from the user presets if you guys are processing a lot of these same materials it's always nice to save your presets so that you don't have to go back and check them in your notes now we can start our job and let the S1 work its magic now one thing I want to mention here is the only limitation to these fixtures is that you need to be Pro processing materials that are the same height you can only set the focus distance to a single value so it works best if everything is at the same height now I love the way these wallets turned out and they happen to be the exact same size as a ridge wallet so if you guys are engraving Ridge wallets for people you'll know that they are very expensive and by having a fixture there's just a lot less of a chance that you're going to screw something up but if you guys are looking for this less expensive wallet here as well as any of the other materials that I'm using in this video I'll put links to those in the videos description down below I also want to demonstrate that these fixtures will still fit if you're using the X tool honeycomb bed and that's even without a riser base on the S1 I'm going to use the same square here to line up the fixture and with the honeycomb bed they come with these magnetic clips and these are useful for just holding that fixture in place now in this case I'm going to be using a xtool metal business card in the last example I left my Square in the machine while the job was running but this time with the whole thing raised up on top of the honeycomb bed the carriage will actually hit the square and we definitely don't want that so if you're using the honeycomb bed just make sure that you take your Square out in this example I'm only using a single fixture so I've gone with the same process probing the top of the metal business card taking the two points the top left hand corner and the bottom right hand corner of the fixture with the twoo measurement system I've got my single green bounding box the template loaded up and fit inside of that box and now I've imported my image that I want to engrave on That Metal business card I place the image over the area labeled metal card and on the right hand side I've got the settings 20% power 200 mm/ second speed and I've set my bitmap mode to Jarvis instead of grayscale because it's a black and white image now these settings come from the X tool reference settings for the metal business card however for some reason they have the lines per centimeter set to 80 instead of 100 so I set it back to 100 this will prevent those horizontal lines from appearing that you just saw in the first preview and when we go to hit process again the second preview should look better when processing this job you'll notice the metal business card moving around here and the job got ruined by the air assist so the air assist was on auto which turns out to be a little too strong I just set it to off for this job and now that very light metal business card is not getting blown around the result here is a beautifully marked marked metal business card and although I used the settings for a black metal business card there were no settings in the reference xtool settings for gold cards but they work just the same a few minutes ago I told you guys about these super cool xtool fake leather patches that turn different colors when you laser them so this one here is a brown leather patch that turns gold when you laser it since I haven't moved my fixture from the last job I don't need to redo the twoo measurement system all I need to do is probe the surface to get the right Focus height for this patch now I can bring in the design with this very recognizable pattern that I think will look stunning in brown and gold going to position it over the area labeled 2x3 patch and for this I'm going to dive into the X tool reference settings and I'm going to select Brown to Gold laser patch on the right hand side like I've done with many of the other examples I'm going to change from grayscale to Jarvis and that's because they have this black and white image I also just want to point out here here that on the template you'll see other measurements like 1 mm 2 mm and so forth and those are for the X tool F1 so on the S1 you can just ignore those measurements in this case here the X tool reference settings were absolutely perfect for these brown leather patches in my videos I like to have fun with recognizable logos but I always point out that I'm not in the business of selling these and I would recommend that you don't do that either selling things with copyrighted or trademark logos that you don't have the appropriate license to do so can land you in some legal trouble so try and avoid that now I'll run an example with the round fixture and I've got this black fake leather patch and rather than using the two-point positioning across the diameter like I showed you guys earlier in the video the fixture will give us a much more accurate result and just like the multi fixture I'm going to use the square to line this one up in the exact same manner I'm going to drop in the patch probe the surface of this patch to get the autofocus height and then use the top left and bottom right hand corner for the two-point positioning system the circular fixture has its own template which again will be included if you purchase these from my website and we're going to import that into the project and position it in the exact same way within the green bounding box created by the two-point measurement system never resize the template if your twoo measurement is slightly off like mine is here just Center the template inside of that green box do not resize it now I've brought in my logo that I'm going to engrave on this patch I'm going to be centering this logo with respect to the template in this case this image has a white background so it's a little harder to see exactly where the position is when working with the circular template it's a lot easier if you bring in images with transparent backgrounds but it's still easy enough to position right in the middle and while that job's running one more reminder to always click on the template and select ignore so the template does not get processed in your job and it's just the logo and this black patch turned out beautiful with the exact same settings as the brown patch 10% power at 140 mm/s we have one final example using this round stainless tag from the xtool materials and again it's set up inside of the circular fixture I'll skip over the fixture and template setup since we've already gone through a bunch of examples and I'll skip to the part here where I import this logo and this time it's a vector image it's obvious with the transparent background it's much easier to see where we're positioning the graphic with respect to the template and because it's a vector file I can select the text object and delete it because I don't want it over on the right hand side under material we'll select more and we'll find the stainless steel dog tag setting in the xtool reference material settings in the bottom leftand corner you can see that we have two layers right now and if I select the layer in the back which is the template we'll make sure it's set to ignore and if I select Layer Two in the foreground we'll have it set to Output I'll change the bit map mode to Jarvis again because it's a black and white image after that it's just a matter of clicking process and the job is done in a few seconds because the tag is so small I personally love using this logo when I test machines because of the very fine details and you can see here that the S1 even captured the very small text above the horse I thought this was pretty impressive and I was also very happy with the perfect positioning of the logo right in the center of this object the very last topic we're going to cover is curved surfaces and I think this is the coolest feature of the S1 so what I have here is a wooden serving dish now I have no idea what type of wood it is but I know that it has a curved surface on the back and we're going to attempt to engrave along that curve on the X2 website they point out some things to be aware of when measuring the curved surface such as measuring surfaces greater than 15° from horizontal and I'll show you guys what happens here if you try that the first thing that's likely to happen is that your material will move and then of course you won't get a measurement at all to avoid that I've just use some painters tape to tape the wood down and I'll move my measurement point up the curve this point on the surface is probably still more than 15° from horizontal and it worked on the top leftand corner of the object but on the bottom right because the probe is on the right side of the laser module the laser module itself hit the material before the probe did the module gets violently driven into the workpiece and event there's an error thrown and now we know how not to do things so in X tool creative space on the top right hand corner we can click curve process and then we can click curve measure and that's going to bring up this screen here where we can start marking the top left and bottom right hand corners of the area that we're interested in measuring the S1 will probe that top leftand corner and then it can manually move the laser head down to the bottom right corner where I'm interested in measuring click on vertex 2 and now it will take a measurement of that position there I moved my measurement point up the curve so this time there was no Collision now X tool creative space will recommend a matrix of measurement points but you can change the density of this Matrix so I'm going to change it to 8X 10 that's going to give us 80 points to measure across that surface as you can imagine this is going to take a few minutes so you're going to have to be patient here I sped this portion of the video up so don't get too excited it's not that fast once it's done you'll see the mesh representing the surface that you're going to want to engrave on there are some sliders and buttons that you can play with to adjust the smoothness and tension of that mesh perhaps if you've measured something with a bumpy or non-uniform Surface you may want to play with these sliders a little bit to just even out your mesh so the laser head won't be going up and down too much in my case the object was pretty smooth and I didn't really have to do anything at the bottom you can change to the different views so a top view here and it highlights this area in yellow I'm going to go ahead and assume that it's suggesting maybe the angle is a little bit too severe in that area and it's giving me a warning but it still allows me to proceed with processing this job now I'm going to bring in my Vector file of this pattern that I'm going to engrave on the surface and I'm going to resize it to fit within the highlighted area which represents the curved surface that we just measured you won't be allowed to place objects outside of that area so so if it doesn't fit you can unlock the height and width relation and you can sort of skew your image a little bit to fit inside as I mentioned earlier I have no idea what type of wood this is so I'm going to set the power to 10% and the maximum speed while doing a curved surface is 30 mm/ second you cannot go faster than that when I click process I see that something doesn't look right here that's way too much black I don't want to be engraving all of that and I notice that I have a second layer there underneath so it looks like it's trying to process the layer behind which shows up in purple right now so I can hide that layer I can also click on it and hit ignore so that does not get engraved and it's only the pattern in Black that will be engraved in this instance so now when I click on process this looks a lot better and we can start our job watching the laser module very closely you can see how it's adjusting up and down to follow that curve and this will maintain that Focus across that surface and make sure that we get a very consistent line width while Engraving and this process is super cool to watch but quite frankly at 30 mm pers second eventually you do get tired of watching it this job took 2 and 1/2 hours now to be fair at the time of this video the feature is in Beta release but I don't think you're ever going to see significantly higher speeds as they probably don't want you crashing your tool head at full speed but regardless if you're into engraving curved surfaces those final results are definitely worth waiting for and so that wraps up the bulk of this video I hope you guys found all those Det details very helpful and my overall impressions of the S1 have been very positive so far uh it's a really highly polished machine and xtool definitely delivered again on the S1 it's pretty obvious that they're trying to create an ecosystem of parts and accessories that are cross-compatible with all of their machines now the X tool equipment definitely isn't cheap but by creating this large ecosystem of parts and accessories it seems like they're interested in supporting them all in the long run so it can make you feel better about about also investing in their tools in the long run in terms of things the S1 is lacking it doesn't have a camera like the more expensive P2 now in L of the camera it uses that two-point positioning system which works really well in most cases it's a little more challenging for round and circular objects but I also showed you guys how to work around that now I thought the dynamic autofocus was a pretty slick trick for Engraving those curved surfaces in the future I'm definitely going to try and find more applications for that and the only thing that I really struggled with on the S1 was cutting through thicker pieces of wood in a minimal number of passes but that's something that I always struggle with so maybe that's just uh user error doesn't really matter if it's the S1 the D1 or other brands I just can't seem to get through wood in only a few passes without setting it on fire I also really like the fully enclosed design it makes you feel so much better about using this machine when other people are around you don't have to worry about blinding them plus the enclosure makes sucking smoke and fumes out so much easier than obviously an open frame machine and the only downside to the enclosure though is that it's pretty shallow so you'd have to buy their Riser kit if you want to fit objects in with a greater depth and so that's it let me know about your first impressions about the X tool S1 down in the comment section below and if you guys appreciate these very in-depth videos be sure to subscribe and if you're looking to support me and my work check out my website embrac making.com where you'll find all of those exclusive upgrades and accessories for the S1 as well as many other laser cut Cutters and engravers that I've shown you guys throughout all of my videos thanks for watching and thank you again to xtool for sending me the [Music] [Music] S1 [Music]

Channel: Embrace Making

Views: 30,840

Keywords: xtool engraving, laser fume extractor, laser cutter fumes, best laser cutter, laser engraving, xtool getting started, xtool 40W, xtool flame detection, laser fume extraction, laser fume filter, laser smoke filter, xtool s1, s1, xtool s1 review, xtool s1 40W, xtool s1 20W, xtool S1 IR, xtool s1 setup, xtool s1 laser cutter, xtool s1 tutorial, xtool s1 laser, xtool s1 cutting, xtool s1 unboxing, xtool s1 conveyor, xtool s1 curve, s1 vs p2, xtool s1 settings, xtool safety

Id: fGyEfWm0zdM

Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023