VisiCut - An Application Genre for Lasercutting in Personal Fabrication
A Bachelor thesis by Thomas Oster, supervised by René BohneFor the VisiCut Software, visit this page.
Download Full Thesis in PDF format
Introduction
A laser-cutter is a central device in Personal Fabrication, especially in FabLabs. Currently working with a laser-cutter requires many unnecessary steps and much experience.The goal of this bachelor thesis is to optimize this work-flow by removing unnecessary steps and make the most common jobs more easy.
It will be outlined, that the existing tools are not sufficient for most users and therefore a new tool named "Visicut" will be developed which will enable users to prepare their laser-jobs at home.
As a base for Visicut and eventually much more specialized applications a user-space driver for laser-cutters named "Liblasercut" will be build, which abstracts from the specific laser-cutter model.
Related Work
CUPS-Epilog
The CUPS-Epilog driver is a CUPS backend, maintained by the AS220 Labs since 2008, which allows using the Epilog Legend laser-cutter as printer in CUPS compatible environments, like many Linux and Mac OS versions.Epilogs Laser Dashboard Print Driver
Epilog provides a printer driver for Windows, which allows laser-cutting from generally every application. The settings specific to the laser-cutter are done in the printer dialogue. The driver can set parameters like power, speed and frequency per colour in vector mode, but only lines thinner than a DPI-dependant threshold are recognized to be cut. Everything else will be dithered by the selected Algorithm (Standard, Brighten, LowRes, Floyd Steinberg, Jarvis and Stucki) and added to the engraving Part.ctrl-cut from Metalab
Ctrl-cut is another CUPS-Backend like the cups-epilog, but with special support for Mac OS.Goals
LibLaserCut
• platform-independent• no administrator privileges needed (application level)
• allows specialized laser-cutting applications and actions not reproducible with the current driver (eg. Changing power,speed,frequency and focus linearly in lines for calibration)
VisiCut
• Tool to import Illustrator/Inkscape/Autocad files and prepare them as laserjobs• based on liblasercut => platform independent etc (Home users often Windows,
FabLabs often Mac OS and Linux)
• Single jar-file application makes it possible to be downloaded from the FabLab page, without installing, and prepare jobs at home before even having a FabLab appointment.
• removes “looking up parameters”, “focus” and “configure driver dialogue” from work-flow
• provides good preview for each material
• adds possibility to save => reproduce => publish laser-jobs (Thingiverse etc)
• Makes Lasercutting more WYSWYG by providing a camera picture of the material in the lasercutter for easy positioning of the graphic directly on the material.