Tutorials

Ruida\Lightburn Upgrades


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Wine Bottle Gift Boxes

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I had a local craft fair this weekend, I wanted to add a few extra/new items to my range so that my stall would be very different from last time. I've seen lots of variations on this wine box so I thought I would make my own version. The living hinges at the top allow the sides to be pulled close and the lid closed, it also a great place to put a handle. The fretwork patterns down the sides make them unique to me as well as the custom labels attached to the side. (svg here)

I didn't sell very many and I'm not sure any were going to be used as wine bottle boxes, one lady wanted to put plants in it and another was going to put fairy lights in hers. Neither wanted the the custom labels so I'm pleased they were only held on with blue tak. It's definitely given me food for thought with the next craft faire looming.



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Wiring the Ruida Controller

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This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible.

The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounting points inside the metal work.

There tends to be a lot of excess wiring on these machines, a 2m long wire will service 10 different models of laser so the long wires tend to get do…
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Cat Alphabet and SVG fonts

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I saw a picture of a Cat based alphabet which was doing the rounds on social media this morning, I was unable to trace the original source but I thought it was awesome and would lend itself to laser cutting because of it's basic line styling. It also makes a very good exercise in constructing an SVG font so I thought I would write it up.
An SVG font was originally intended as a way of embedding font information inside an SVG document. Icon fonts and SVG fonts are now used widely across the internet due to their ability to store a collection of images within a single file. Each unicode character references a different image and these images can be any drawing you like as defined by the SVG standard.A traditional font requires a series of filled shapes, the letter 'I' for example would be a filled rectangle. While laser cutting the process of shading that rectangle would be done by engraving, filling it with a series of dots which is very time consuming. An alternate would be…
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