Simple line image, how to cut just on the lines?

[Linzra (Lindsey Owen)]

Hi all!

New to Laser Cutting, so please forgive me! I have a Ruida Controller, 50W CO2 laser (you know the drill, Chinese special ).

I’m trying to cut this image, this simple spiral. I import the image and go to ‘Trace Image’, becuase I only want to cut on the black line. I have two issues though:

1. The cut looks very ‘jerky’, is there a way in LightBurn to smooth out the image?
2. Is it possible to edit the cut instructions? I don’t really want to trace the whole image, just cut directly on the black line, preferably with one single cut!

What’s happening now is that it traces the outline back and forth, which is slowing me down (trying to cut three dozen of these trees to hang up at the School!)

Thanks!

[Bonjour (Bo)]

You need to tell it what kind of object it is: I suspect you have it set to ‘fill’. It needs to be ‘line’ to cut.

Have you read the documentation or viewed any of the training videos?

[LightBurn (Oz)]

If you’re tracing a simple line, you’ll end up with both an inside and an outside of the line, because of the way the trace works. If you can, you’re better off exporting that shape in a vector format, instead of an image.

If you don’t have one, InkScape is a free vector drawing program, and one of the drawing primitives it has is a spiral. LightBurn will just load its files (SVGs). With one of those, running in ‘Line’ mode as Mike suggests above, you’d get a simple spiral output from the laser.

[raysosher (Ray)]

Though the line is very thin still you can cut it out using Adobe illustrator. To do that you need to draw the line using pen tool.