Software Setup

Install Inkscape or use a lab machine with Adobe Illustrator on it. If you have another 2D design program you really like, you are welcome to use it instead.

Inkscape

  1. Create a new document
  2. Go to File -> Document Properties
  3. Under the Page tab, change Default units to “in”
  4. Under “Custom Size” on the Page tab, change Units to “in”, Width to 32 and height to 18
  5. Close the Document Properties window
  6. In the toolbar, find the set of icons that look like . Click the leftmost icon to turn it off, so it looks like . This operation disables the defaul behavior of scaling the width of an object’s line when you change the size of the object.

Illustrator

  1. Go to File -> New
  2. In the New Document window, change the Units to “Inches”, Width to 32 in and Height to 18 in
  3. Open the Advanced area
  4. Change Color Mode to RGB

Preparing your graphics

You can make two different kinds of cuts: vector or raster. Vector is a “cut”: the laser follows the line you set. Raster is more like an inkjet printer: the laser goes back and forth to create an image or engraving.

In order to select raster or vector, you change two

The laser cutter works via a print driver. This is good, because it means that you don’t have to use a particular program. This is bad, because you have to set strange settings in your programs.

The laser cutter’s default behavior is to raster, or engrave. Even vectorized lines will be in raster mode by default. For every line in your design that you want to cut rather than raster, you must do two things.

  1. First, you must set the line color to 100% red. It must be exactly RGB (255, 0, 0). This is why in Illustrator you must set the color mode to RGB instead of CMYK.
  2. Second, you must set the line to be equal to or less than 1,000th of an inch thick, or <= .001 inches.

When the laser cutter gets a line that looks like this, then it will cut it with the power level you instruct in the print control panel.