Svg

This page describes the special considerations you have to take into account when producing an SVG for the PhotonSaw.

• The recommended program to use is Inkscape, because it produces files in a known resolution and that makes everything easier
• At the moment only the stroke and the raster content of the file is being processed, this means that fancier elements, such as stroke-style and fill get ignored
• Unlike some laser systems that use colors of drawings to indicate a selection of laser parameters, the SVG importer understands, specific CSS style attributes, so no secondary configuration is needed:
  • photonsaw-speed: The target speed in mm/s
  • photonsaw-power: The power at the target speed in W (so the maximum for an 80 Watt machine is 80)
  • photonsaw-assistair: Turns the assist air on or off, engraving will generally work better without, while cutting must use assist air
  • photonsaw-passes: The number of passes to make, each path is repeated individually with the same speed and power parameters
  • photonsaw-linepitch: The distance between lines in rasters, also the default pixel pitch, will be rounded off to whole steps (0.0375 mm with the current hardware)

NEW:

• photonsaw-raster-speed: Speed used for rasterisation (eg of text - used in stead of photonsaw-speed).
• photonsaw-raster-pitch: In stead of photonsaw-linepitch.

The style attributes can be set on a group and thus inherited to all the elements in that group, which makes it easy to only set the parameters once.

Copy-pastable example:

<g style="photonsaw-speed:20;photonsaw-power:80;photonsaw-assistair:true;photonsaw-passes:3">
  <!-- Your layer data here -->
</g>

Layers are read from the SVG file (and executed in the PSAW) from the top of the file to the bottom. And inkscape writes the topmost layers at the bottom of the file. This means that the highest layer will be lasered last. Think of an artist painting, the paint at the bottom went on first. It's the same with lasers, only slightly more awesome.

When the web interface for managing the machine is complete, all the parameters should be configurable through the browser, but for now each SVG must provide its own parameter settings.

Fortunately, Robotto has made a plugin for inkscape, which will help you edit the SVGs find it here.