With Ryan’s blessing I’m posting a newly revised version of Villamany’s awesome laser engraving software. I made some revisions including:
Clean up gcode output- add whitespace and newlines to make gcode “Marlin-Friendly”
Add boxes where you can select or add your own Mcodes for laser-on and laser-off commands. This will allow the software to work with ANY controller configuration. “MPCNC-Friendly”
The Vicious Logo of course!
Settings have to be entered on first run, software will retain after that. Thanks for your help troubleshooting Karl:)
I love it! I agree.If we continue to improve on this then we should definitely fork it out. I’d really like to add the ability to define material stock size to see what the image placement will look like and set origin also. Just no time…
Great work, guys! I would really like to have the ability to set the origin. A lot of times, it’s easiest to use a center origin for easy placement of a graphic. For me, anyway.
Added an origin selection feature to help with centering pictures:
It also does a quick box around the image to show you overall placement (at power M106 S5)
I also forked the original on GitHub, so now it will be easier to collaborate on this. (I’m learning to use GitHub along the way, so bear with me)
I noticed that when the resolution is very small, it was really slowing down the movement. Perhaps I will look into optimizing the code when I get a chance.
I tried latest version of your modified Image2Gcode but after built the Gcode and loaded it on Repetier Host, in print preview I got a green square which is not displaying any rendered image and if I burn that Gcode with my laser I got the same result as shown on Repetier print preview. I tried to load on image2gcode other BMP images but I always got the same result. Hope that the attached images can better describe the issue.
Any help will be really appreciated.
Can you upload the gcode file? Unfortunately, Repetier Host will not show any details for a raster image. Since it only shows the travel moves, and not the laser intensity, it is impossible to see a preview of the image.
Thanks for your prompt replay, unfortunately the generated Gcode is too big to be uploaded on here. I’m sorry but I did’t know that Repetier can not display any detail of the raster image. I’m using a 500 mw blue-violet 405nm laser module and I guess that if the power will PWD under 50/60% it will not burn any material, may be this is the problem when I burn the Gcode generated by image2gcode and I guess It’s better for my 500 mw laser to use MAX or Anodized Aluminium profile, isn’t it? Is also useful or not to allow feed rate override?
Thanks again for your kind help.
With a 500 mW laser you are definitely going to want to do close to MAX power, as well as slowing the feed rate down. The different profiles can be tuned to your laser, they were just set at points that I found worked with the 2.8W 445nm laser.
The feedrate override checkbox just allows the profile to update the feedrate box on the GCODE page - nothing else. I made it optional in case you didn’t (or did) want the feedrate to keep getting changed when you switched profiles.
Is it possible you were using the last version and are now using this one and all the settings reverted back to default values including Min and max power plus federate? You can zip the gcode file before you upload and it’ll probably be under max size.
Sure makes things a lot easier