Drawing To Engraving

The third and final project from this years maker faire was a webcam capture program that would easily digitise children's drawings and then send them down to the laser cutter for engraving. The webcam holder with led lighting to illuminate the drawing. I used a c# wrapper for the open CV library to capture images from the webcam, a little bit of filtering to remove pixels that weren't black enough. The image was then converted to G Code, and transferred to a GRBL controller that was wired into the Greyfin laser cutter. The G Code simply drives the laser to the next black pixel and burns a single dot for each pixel, repeat for each black pixel in the image.

The program ended up being a bit of a mess as it evolved throughout the course of the weekend. It's got some nice features though such as the ability to capture or load an image for engraving, automatic detection of GRBL devices on the serial ports and free text sending to control GRBL directly. I've attached the code here should you want to achieve something similar (Source code)

One good thing that did come from the code was a simple program to save and load GRBL settings to a controller or a text file. I managed to overwrite my settings by accident and this program allows me to save them all in a text file and then send them to the controller in a few clicks, similar things probably exist elsewhere but this is my version. (Source and Executable)

Below the cut is a veritable rogues gallery of all the artwork that was done over the two days