Cutting dots with CO2 laser

I have seen on Youtube someone use their laser to ‘peck’ dots around thin material (paper, mylar etc)

I wondered how this might be achieved in Lightroom.

Rather than cutting small circles (which causes stress on the laser machine, and ultimately a lot slower), just moving to the required position, and then giving the laser a pulse.

FYI, The design I’m looking at has several hundred dots, so it’s not a manual process!

Thanks.

I’m not a Lightroom user, but LightBurn might be able to do what you require by using tabs. I envision a shape appropriate to your task, with either very small tabs and small spacing or larger tabs and smaller spacing. Each shape and size may require manual adjustment, but if the spacing is good, you might get away with all shapes.

The test I just attempted allows me to create tabs as small as 0.10 mm spaced 1.10 mm apart. If I increase the tab to 0.25 mm, the spacing becomes no smaller than 1.25 mm. This does generate the dots on the perimeter, but the relatively wider spacing may not match your needs.

I just realized that you may also be able to accomplish this by using Inkscape and creating or using a canned stroke that is mostly dots. You can adjust the stroke width and spacing of the dots or dashes and if required, convert the stroke to path, then import the saved SVG to Lightburn.

I’ll assume auto-correct misspelled LightBurn. :wink:

Using the ‘Perforation Mode’, set a short perforation ‘Cut’ to make a “dot” like cut around the path of the shape.

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