My mini laser engraver

[Halitech]

I think the bigger issue is finding software to convert a color photo into a b&w image. I've seen some that have burned them onto wooded cutting boards and they looked really good. Part of that could be the more solid nature of the wood compared to leather

[jrjr2u]

If you guys have facebook, check out the group- 'That dude with a laser'
There's lots of good info on laser engraving on there. My laser has the Ruida controller and I use Lightburn. Great program. There's a free trial of it if you want to check it out. $80 US to buy but its worth it I think. I do most of my dxf editing in it. If you only want to convert to black and white check out Gimp - https://www.gimp.org/

It's free and open source. Been using that for years. I also use Corel Draw and Paint shop pro for editing. Inkscape is another for vector work.

[jrjr2u]

Here's a few things I have made.... coasters, bamboo cutting board, and a couple ceramic tiles. Tiles are white tile painted black then lasered.

[sbrownn]

On 4/14/2019 at 3:57 PM, RockyAussie said:

Are you able to change the software in that engraver? I have been using T2 Laser for awhile and find it fairly good. I have been doing a bit of looking into Lightburn recently as they seem to have a fairly promising forum there. Here a link- https://forum.lightburnsoftware.com/

I have not tried it yet but I remember seeing something about the reduced size problems in there somewhere. Their camera software looks very interesting as well.

Will your laser accept STL files?

[RockyAussie]

7 minutes ago, sbrownn said:

Will your laser accept STL files?

I will have to check and get back to you later.

[dikman]

I don't see how a laser printer/cutter could accept/use .stl files. These files contain data for a 3-dimensional object, whereas printer/cutters work in 2 dimensions (ok, I know you can set depth but it's only a fraction of the Z height in most 3-dimensional .stl files).

[sbrownn]

That's a good point.  There must be a drawing file format, dxf or something that describes 2D objects so perhaps that would be better.

[RockyAussie]

I can't say for sure as I have only ever used DXF and PLT - 2 dimensional drawings and  images that get converted by the T2  Laser program to G code. The Z adjustment has only come into use for depth of cutting so far.

[chrisash]

I found this conversion file that seems to do the conversion stl to other formats at $60 which might work, have no need myself so have not tried it

https://3d-viewers.com/index.html

[dikman]

Interesting, although it doesn't actually say what it converts from and to, just says it can read a heap of different file formats?