As much as I love Inkscape, it just can’t do this one thing. I saved the whole thing and exported it as an stl file all in about 5 minutes. I quickly made the 12x18 rectangle to cut with cool rounded corners and placed 48 holes nicely arranged and centered inside it. It dawned on me that LightBurn has a array/grid function. That would be a messy time consuming job. Since I plan on having a pattern of holes evenly spaced 6 rows high by 8 rows long, I don’t want to place them all by hand. I started creating the design in Inkscape and quickly realized its not capable of arranging an array of 1/8” holes the way I want. I’m going to cut it out of 1/16 aluminum sheet with a waterjet. I bought a pack of 50 1” spikes with screw bases on eBay. However this week I want to build a 12” x 18” “Spike Plate” for my laser. I have a big 473 page book on everything Inkscape all dog eared with notes. I use Inkscape all the time for my design work.

It has every feature you could want, is extremely fast, and documentation is not an issue as thousands of users have experienced every possible configuration and there is a wealth of information available on the internet.I know they’re two completely different things. as someone who has owned many lasers and various controllers over the years, including the M2Nano, Cohesion3D mini, Cohesion3D Laserboard, Lettro DSP, Ruida DSP, Smoothie clones, Real Smoothieboiard, and the awesometech miniGerbil and SuperGerbil, I prefer the Ruida to all the others.įor about $300, you can get an industrial controller that runs the free RDWorks software or the new industry standard LightBurn software, which is inexpensive, feature-rich, and under active development with great support. If you want to build a proper CO2 laser controller, most people seem to choose to base it on Ruida.

A good CO2 Laser Machine not only helps you a lot, but can save you a lot of money, but building a CO2 laser cutting machine, there are many factors to consider when choosing a controller, the most important of which are your easy to use software, G-code post-processor, machine interface and firmware

Lightburn vs rdworks