I have the original Snapmaker with the 1600mW laser module. I had big plans and started designing things in Inkscape. Now I wanted to start cutting, and to my dismay, I realized that Luban doesn’t handle SVGs properly. First, I have to import each object that I want to laser at a different setting as a separate SVG, and then instead of just cutting one path, it creates about 24 paths.
Luna seems completely useless for doing meaningful work, as it’s not suitable for creating mid-level SVG graphics and can’t process imported SVGs.
The hardware seems to work well (apart from the power switch, which has stopped working), but the software is garbage.
There’s apparently another tool called LightBurn. The instructions on the Snapmaker website seem to work hardly at all, and they’re not available for the original model.
Has anyone figured out a solution? I had planned a larger gift and now fear I won’t be able to complete it.
Since I can transfer G-code to the Snapmaker using Luban, I’m now considering whether I can use another tool to calculate the paths and then send them to the machine via Luban import. Does anyone have experience with this or other ideas?
I think i found the reason for the problem (not that this helps to actually cut). Since Luban makes the whole svg into a single object, i can’t use it this way. Different parts are supposed to be cut, while other are supposed to be engraved. So my solution was it to hide all objects that should use different settings and save the files under different names to import it. This seems to work, but it created to problem, that all lines where cut way to often.
I wanted so share one of the files with you to test it and i notices, that it looks like only the one objects was imported correctly and it set how it was supposed to be handled. The two hidden objects are correctly ignored.
But the Preview shows me, that it suddenly had also the hidden objects.
(Next image, see the next post, since i only can add one image per post as a new user)
I didn’t noticed that before, because i added all three objects. This means every object was actually added 3 times. Two should cut 12 times and the last one a single time. So it ended up with 25 cuts for each object.
So i guess a solution would be to create x copies of the object i want and to fully delete the parts that are not visible currently. This should work. This is off course not a very fast workflow
This is the svg in question (one of the three files i created) for the example.
Some Frustrations with SVG in Luban that existed in the past (and of which several have been fixed by now) were possible to work around if in Inkscape you selected all objects and use “Convert to path”.
That said, I understand that your issue is more with using parts of an SVG for different operations. Indeed, Luban is too simple to do this. Are you aware of Lightburn? This can do exactly what you want. It used to be rather affordable, but they recently increased their prices - still, if you plan to do such work often, I guess it’s well invested money. There’s a free trial.
