Puzzle piece cutting

[RodB (Rodney Beadon)]

I am trying to do a very basic puzzle.

I have stuck the picture to a piece of 3mm MDF.

I have the individual pieces of the puzzle as shown in the below diagram.

I then joined all the pieces together to match the size of the picture.

When I want to print this each piece is printed separately. In the correct place but on the tabs and sockets its doing it twice and this is a problem.
How do i get the pieces that join to just cut once.

[JohnJohn (John Johnson)]

You have an interesting paradox here.

The fast way to do this so you only engrave the tabs and sockets once, is to send two puzzle pieces and just their tabs and sockets to the engraver.

Use the pencil tool on the left to draw two of lines on your two pieces.
The lines should snap to the corners of the puzzle pieces.
don’t worry about the corner - just get two lines in with snapped-ends.

Then use the node edit tool to put the corner in the right place.

There is a ‘remove overlapping lines’ but this is what I’d do.

There is more than one way to do this.

Here’s a customer video about Removing Overlapping Lines.
This is faster.

"Did Ya Know?" You can remove overlapping lines.

[bernd.dk (Bernd)]

John, that makes no sense. The purpose of the tool is primarily to avoid “doubletracing”/cutting, as far as I know. When we have to separate the subjects with common lines, I can no longer see the purpose of this tool. If it was a very large puzzle, the work of taking the puzzle apart will be far too much, compared to the gain, plus you’ll waste material anyway.
In my little example, it works as I think it should. It can always be discussed whether a different cutting pattern could reduce the “rapid moves”, but it is not time that we primarily want to reduce, but we want to avoid double burns.

The individual squares are 50x50 and it fits very precisely with the specified cutting length indicated in the preview window, by only moving the laser once over all outer lines and once over all common lines.

But still, when I make an attempt with a simple puzzle that does not only consist of straight edges, I can’t get the same result, there are always some “double burners” I’ll try playing around with it a bit more and see if I can’t figure it out.

In practice, however, there are other challenges with “cutting everything out” without gaps, which are not to be included in this discussion.

[JohnJohn (John Johnson)]

I went looking for a puzzle generator to see if an alternating checkerboard piece placement and adding the odd edge lines worked in all cases. I don’t see a case where that doesn’t work to remove duplicates.

I found this puzzle generator which made my previous point moot.
https://draradech.github.io/jigsaw/index.html

All the vertical and horizontal lines are separate, the puzzle pieces are not joined entities

Imported into LightBurn without issue…

No duplicates and very little traverse.

There’s almost always more than one way to do nearly anything in LightBurn.

[bernd.dk (Bernd)]

Fantastic

[JohnJohn (John Johnson)]

I am pleased that this meets with your approval.

[RodB (Rodney Beadon)]

WOW,

Thank you very much. This has worked perfectly for me.