Put my laser engraver to good use for the first time, engraving text and graphics for a Walnut front panel for my Shruthi XT synth. I’m really happy with the results!

I ended up using Eazydraw to design the panel as usual, then after some searching discovered LaserWeb4, an amazing open source CAM tool designed for laser usage but also with routing capabilities.

It took some time and experimentation to figure out how best to engrave the various text and graphics. In the end I found that Inside cuts along the text, on-path cuts on most of the graphics and some particularly thin text, and inside cuts+fills with very carefully set margins on the inverted filled sections produced good results.

I’m definitely going to be looking into LaserWeb4 in more detail. I want to investigate it’s conventional routing CAM cabapilities, and potentially switch to this over using Easel, as LW4 is open source, allows for much more detailed control of the machine, and runs offline.