Laser Cutter Training for Cyclops

Instead of a honeycomb, the bed is made up of many individual blades which are removable. There are two types and you should only use one set at a time. The straight blades are for general purpose use. You’ll mostly be using these and they should be what normally gets left in the machine. The sawtooth blades are mainly used when cutting steel, or if you want to completely minimize scorching on the back of your workpiece. I incorrectly left the sawtooth blades in during most of this video.

Here’s how it should look with just the straight blades. Underneath the bed, it tapers down to a smaller removable tray that should catch anything that falls through the bed. You can access the tray by opening the white front panel with the latch. The tray has a handle and it simply slides in and out.

01:17 - To turn on the laser cutter, just press the power button, and the usual things are going to happen. The head’s going to home to the back right corner, the chiller will turn on, the exhaust fan will turn on, and the air compressor should turn on if it wasn’t on already. With the laser powered up we can jog the head around with the d-pad, and we can move it over our material. Next we want to focus the laser cutter on our material. This machine has an auto-focus so it’s a little more complicated than bumblebee was.

In addition to the table, the head itself can move up and down. First, for this, it’s very important that your material is directly below the nozzle. If it’s not you’ll crash the machine and we don’t want to do that. Next we want to lower the head, either as far as it will go or until the nozzle is very close to the material. From the main screen on the controller, the Z-Up and Z-Down buttons move the head up and down. Here I’m going to use the Z-Down arrow to lower the head.

02:15 - Here I hit the limit. I can clear this message with escape.

02:20 - Next press the Z/U button, and then hit enter on “Auto Up&Down”. that initiates the auto focus. The bed moves up, bumps into the nozzle, and goes back down a set distance. Now, it should be focused. I’m going to go back to the Z/U screen because it’s a little non-intuitive as to how it works. So the first option here “Auto Up&Down” is the auto focus. In order to scroll through this menu, we use the Z-Up and Z-Down arrows. “Z Move” refers to the height of the nozzle, and “U Move” refers to the height of the table.

So if I have “U Move” selected and I press down, the table lowers. And I can raise the table (with Z-Up). If I select “Z Move”, I can raise the nozzle and I can lower the nozzle. I’m just going to go back and auto-focus it again.

03:15 - [Laser beeps] Now we need to prepare a file to send to the laser cutter, so let’s switch to the software LightBurn. So this is LightBurn, and the first thing you’ll probably notice is it looks a lot like LaserCut. It has a lot of similarities but also a lot of important differences, so to show those off I’m going to jump straight into importing a file under “File > Import”.

03:36 - Here we can also see all the file types that LightBurn supports. It supports limited engraving of raster image formats like JPG and PNG, as well as cutting and engraving of several vector formats. Like LaserCut, we can import Adobe Illustrator AI files and DXF files and plotter files. LightBurn can also import SVGs and PDFs. But be careful with PDFs, since you can put literally anything inside them. I’ll just select my specially made demo file that I created in Illustrator.

My art appears selected in the middle of the workspace. LightBurn shows objects as selected by giving them an animated, dashed border. We can see them better if I zoom in with the mouse wheel and then deselect everything. Just like in LaserCut, line or stroke color is used to differentiate between different object types. I gave all these different colors in Illustrator, but I really just want to cut out the rounded rectangle, do a deep engrave on the text, and a light engrave on the shapes.

So I’m going to move all of the shapes to the blue layer. So now we have multiple ways to change cut and engrave settings. The first is directly in the Cuts and Layers pane. I can select a color and then in the drop down, I get a choice of modes. Line means cut and Fill means engrave. Fill+Line is supposed to engrave and then also cut out the shape, but I’m having issues with that, so I’m going to skip it for now. Offset Fill is a specialized type of engrave, and hopefully I’ll cover both of those last two in another video.

For the black layer, I’m going to select fill. Below the list of layers is a brief list of settings, and, first, a quick aside: LightBurn is designed for many different laser cutters, so not every option shown is relevant to our system. Here we have buttons for Laser 1 and Laser 2 because some much fancier laser cutters have multiple cutting heads. We always want to use Laser 1 and make sure the Laser 2 is disabled and then we can ignore it. So here we can adjust the layer Speed and Power.

For an engrave or Fill, speed can be just about anything depending on the depth that you want, but usually it should be between 200 and 500. Power scales from zero to 100. “Max Power” is the normal power and “Min Power” is what LaserCut called Corner Power. I’ve also seen it referred to as turning power. For a Fill, we can ignore the Min Power. “Interval” refers to the engraved line spacing. LaserCut called this Scan Gap. The manufacturer recommends a pretty small Interval, so that’s what I’m going to be using for now.

We can open a more advanced layer settings screen by double clicking on the layer. We can still set mode, speed, and power. There’s also a second column referring to Laser 2 which we can ignore. “Output” controls whether or not this layer actually gets engraved. We want that on. Also make sure that “Air Assist” is turned on, since you can easily damage the machine if it’s turned off. Green means On. Below that, we can change whether the engrave is bi-directional.

You usually want this turned on, since it saves a lot of time. You can also enable cross-hatching, where it will do a second engrave pass rotated 90 degrees to the first. The manual suggests this can make the engrave look more uniform and filled in, especially if you use a larger line interval. You can also change the angle of the engraved lines, if you don’t want it to go just left to right for some reason.

06:45 - Finally, you can change the order that it engraves. By default, it engraves everything at once in one pass. If you have a very large object with only a few small engraves far apart from each other, you might save time trying the other options here. Now, for the other layers, I can either click OK and then reopen the layer settings window for each layer, or from the left side of this window, I can select a different color and quickly jump between layers.

For the green layer, I want it to be a cut, so I make sure that the mode is set to Line. We can set the speed the max power and the min power here. There’s also the column for laser 2 which should be ignored. Make sure Output and Air Assist are both checked. Below that are a couple advanced settings. You can set a positive or negative kerf offset, which can be useful if your goal is very precisely sized parts that fit together. Perforation turns your cut into a dashed line.

Tabs and Bridges are supposed to be an advanced type of perforation. In addition to directly setting the layer settings in this window, there’s also a library of presets under the Library tab at the bottom. So Boss shipped us a pre-made library of cut and engrave presets for a variety of materials on this machine, and I hope we can expand this library as we better learn its capabilities. So let’s say we’re cutting acrylic. There’s a preset here for cutting quarter inch acrylic.

If I select it, and select the green layer, and click “Assign to Layer” it applies the preset to that layer. We can do the same thing for the engraving layers. All the engraving presets are going to be listed under “no thickness” since your material thickness doesn’t really matter when you’re engraving. Here, I’ll apply that preset to both fill layers. I’ve noticed that the engrave presets in here tend to use a very low power, so you usually get a very shallow engrave.

But the good news is that you can actually create your own library presets. The easiest way is to edit one of your layers to be what you want it to be. Here I’m going to change the power of this engrave to 50. And then if I click “Create new from layer”, specify the material name and give it a description, I can create a new preset called Deep Engrave with a different power. After you’ve created a preset, make sure to use the save button in the library panel to save your changes.

LightBurn also supports multiple library files, so you can use the Save As button to save your own personal library if you want. One last thing to note in the cuts and layers panel is the order of operations is top to bottom, and you can adjust the order with the arrows on the right. Normally you’ll want your cut layer to be last, so I’m going to move the line all the way to the bottom.

09:19 - This file is just about all set up so, I’m going to save it now which creates a LightBurn file containing all art and the settings.

09:33 - One thing I can do as a final check before sending it to the laser is run a preview. That’s with this monitor looking button at the top. It will also tell us if it finds any errors. For example, “Three shapes were set to fill but weren’t closed. These have been removed as they cause problems. ” I’m going to continue and let it show me what it’s going to do, and it left out our triangle. The problem is the triangle is made up of three lines that aren’t connected, so it doesn’t know how to engrave them.

Just like in LaserCut, you could run Unite Lines, if I select the shapes and I go to “Edit > Auto-Join selected shapes” it’s going to connect them into one contiguous shape. Now, when I run the preview, everything shows as engraving and cutting, and if I hit the play button it will even go through what it’s going to do. In the preview, black lines are cuts and engraves and red lines are travels.

10:37 - Now it’s time to send it to the laser cutter. So we’re going to go to the laser tab on the bottom here. One last thing is to set the Job Origin. Just like in LaserCut, you can set it to one of the four corners or any of the middles. I like setting it to the front right corner. You can see the green square here moves around to show you where the origin is. To actually get the file onto the laser we’re going to click the Send button.

11:06 - Sometimes, the laser and the software disconnect from each other, so I’m going to click OK, click through the error message, and to reconnect the laser to the software, Right-Click the Device button. It re-draws the screen, and now when I click Send, it lets me set a file name and I can click OK.

11:30 - [Laser beeps like a good laser cutter] The laser beeps, and the file is on the laser.

11:40 - You can tell your file is on the laser cutter when the art appears in the preview screen and your file name appears next to File. We can also select from the other files that are currently in the laser cutter with the File button. And we can scroll through the list of everything that’s been uploaded so far, all the way back to the first file that was uploaded at the factory. We may have to delete these at some point if the memory fills up, but for now you could just keep adding files.

I’m going to go back to the file we added and select it. I’m going to use the d-pad to jog to the corner of the material as our start point. We’ve already auto focused, but we can use the box button–The box button functions just like the Test button on Bumblebee. The head will trace out the area of the material the job will use. You can also use the laser button to pulse the laser just to verify it’s going to hit where you think it is, however the red dot on this machine is in line with the laser beam so it should stay cleaner and really shouldn’t get out of alignment.

Now we’re ready to start the job so I’m going to close the lid, make sure I know where the e-stop is in case something goes wrong, make sure the chiller, air compressor, and exhaust fan are on, and the exhaust gate is open, and then hit the Start button.

13:09 - The engrave starts and you can actually see the progress on the preview screen. If for some reason I want to stop this job in the middle I can use the Stop button, and the head will go back to the origin. The Start/Pause button will pause the job in the middle and if I hit it again it’ll resume.

13:37 - There’s a percentage progress meter here that doesn’t seem to be too accurate as far as i’ve been able to tell. It also shows the job time here.

13:49 - The current layer’s speed and power are also shown right here.

14:04 - You can see on the progress meter we’re just at 50 percent, and it’s almost done engraving. Since it only has the cut left, it should really be closer to 90 percent done.

14:19 - [Laser beeps proudly] The job finishes and the head moves back to the origin.

14:28 - So here’s the final piece popped out. Now that we’re done, remember remove your material from the bed. Put any of the blades back in the bed if you took any out, and if you produce a lot of little cutouts remember to open the front door, pull out the drawer, and empty that in the trash.

15:01 - To turn off the laser cutter, all you need to do is press the power button. The exhaust fan should turn off if the other laser cutter isn’t on, the chiller should turn off along with it. That’s it. One final closing note on this video: for any buttons or features that I didn’t explicitly mention here, chances are they probably fall into one of two categories. If it looks new and you aren’t sure what it does, it probably doesn’t do anything useful or noteworthy right now so it’s probably best not to mess with it.

Or if it has an analog on Bumblebee and Wolverine, it probably just works the same way and I didn’t think to bring it up. And if you have any questions, as always you can ask the zone coordinator or ask in the #laserzone Slack channel.

15:39 - Thanks for watching!.