With Art’s permission…
For many years now I have successfully used Art’s Mach3 Impact / Laser engraving plugin for CO2 laser engraving 8 bit photographic images onto wood (and other materials). Unfortunately, due to the nature of the pulse timing this plugin will only operate via the PC’s Parallel Port, which is rapidly becoming obsolete, so an alternative was desperately needed.
Art never seems to tire of software development and along with a small handful of others I have recently been trying out ‘Auggie’. This FREE software started as an extension of Gearotic Motion but now stands in it’s own right. It is a very basic (trimmed down) CNC solution which incorporates the beautiful ‘S-Curve’ acceleration / deceleration of the Tempest planner (which really should have been incorporated into Mach3 but never was) and it has been designed around the 57CNC USB and Ethernet CNC controller.
Although Auggie would be equally at home with basic CNC milling, routing, etc. it has some advanced features designed specifically for laser use and it can support RF, DC, Diode and most other types of lasers. It does not stop there as Auggie has many more interesting features which, for the most part, are described here;
http://gear2motion.com/auggieFor me, the most important thing about Auggie is that it has the ability to process 8 bit photographic images and although it is a very different process to the old plugin the final results appear very similar. I am still working on how to get the best results with an electromagnet but Auggie can also be used for Impact Electromagnet operation.
In the following pics, one was produced with my CO2 laser and the other with my impact electromagnet.
Tweakie.
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