So I want to print a big blocky pixelated image, and how the heck do I get Luban’s image tool (in the laser engraving menu) to read it as proper big blocky pixels? The closes I came is setting it to B&W, and turning the slider down to minimum, but it’s acting like the lines are 2 pixels thick, and on pixel art that kinda matters.
EDIT: I figured out a work around actually. If the minimum setting only adds one pixel, I just open the original in MS-Paint, blow it up 500% (the max) twice, save it, and import that. Good old crap-shoot Paint won’t de-pixelate anything, so now I have pixel art where each square is 25 pixels across, and making them 26 doesn’t really matter so much.
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Odd thing about this print: the left/right edges always come out really dark when compared to the center fill. I ran an approx 50mm square print on 6.35mm thick balsa wood, using 100% laser speed and 625mm/min working speed. It came out pretty well, though only the “1 px” thick sections (left/right thick) were nice and dark. I may need to reduce power and turn down the feed rate, but I think the problem comes from the way Luban makes tool paths in Black & White mode. Each of the rows (shown in the second image in my previous post) is cut first left to right, then up a row, then right to left. At each U-turn the beam is closer to the previously cut area than when it’s traveling in a straight line, so it heats up the material there more. This could be resolved through a few methods without substantially increasing print times I think.
If you number each row, starting from the bottom (as is the default) and cut row 1 left to right, then say… row 5 on the returning right to left cut, and always make sure that the last row is a few away from the one you just did, I think that’d help quite a bit. At the start and end it might have to take a few inefficient rapid moves to make this happen, or dwell for a small period of time for the material to cool, but overall the increase in time shouldn’t be too bad, and the consistency of the result should be well worth it.
