Hey all. I’m looking to upgrade my cheap K40 laser to Smoothie. I see on the front page that laser engraving is a “more to come” feature. Is there any more info on this feature? I’m sure I read that it was in development this time last year when I looked, and there are forum posts going back to 2014 about it.
I understand that engraving can be achieved client side by formatting the relevant G0 / G1 commands, but engraving in firmware should give a few advantages over the current method.
So, right now, laser engraving using inkscape plugins or laserweb or visicut *does* work.
We want ultimately to get “native” ( in-firmware ) laser engraving to work, but because there are alternatives there is not a strong pressure to implement it.
However if somebody wants to do it, they will get all the help I can give them.
And there are people slowly advancing on this.
@arthurwolf
Can you tell me please if some activities regarding “native engraving” had started yet generally?
Maybe I have time for this topic, but I’m sure I need some basic background information, i.e. what would be the best concept so far, is the 1ms-interrupt a good place to perform the intensity-values and so on…
I know a little bit how Marlin manages the G-code and how the data is written in the buffer…
Best regards
Johann Langhofer
If you want to understand how an engraver should look, its characteristics and compatible software then, you can find a lot of information here. I can also advise software that converts raster images to vector, and vector - to gcode. For example, free distributed programs InkScape, SketchUp, GBRLcontroller, Repetierhost, Cura.