Laser cutting from the command line

One of NYCR’s most popular weekly classes is in using our Epilog mini-35 laser cutter. The only supported system is Windows with CorelDRAW and Epilog’s closed source driver, which doesn’t seem right for a hackerspace. Luckily, AS220 Labs has figured out how to talk to the Epilog using PJL. I’ve written a command line tool, epilog, that will translate the Postscript file into commands for the cutter.

There are a few differences from Epilog’s driver — the most significant is that with the epilog command line tool the home position is always the upper right of the page, not the center of the bounding box as in the Windows printer driver version. The other major difference is that the lines to be cut are distinguished by color, not width: anything that is #FF0000 will be translated into a vector cut.

To use it from inkscape you will need to write out a Postcript file by selecting “Print to file” and writing the output.ps file. Then you can run it through the tool like this…

1 Comment

1. 

   CowCaBob

   July 19, 2011 at 4:13 am

   I never thought a for loop would come in handy in shop class before.

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