I started using laser cutters a decade ago and was a little surprised at the primitive controlling software. Our big-money, brand-name laser cutter came with a printer driver for Windows and nothing else. We did all our work in Illustrator, saved a copy to a flash drive, copied it to the PC in front of the laser cutter, imported it in to Corel Draw, then accessed the laser cutter through a printer driver. Want to make a change? Go back to Illustrator to make the change then follow the path back to the laser cutter.<\/p>\n
Ten years later we have a flood of inexpensive laser cutters from China and open source projects like the Lasersaur<\/a> but the software? Not showing ten years of progress and UI development. The Lasersaur UI is better than a printer driver, and as it’s open source, we’ve been able to add features as needed. (I have a tree with more DXF support<\/a>.) In general, the usability features we need in hacker spaces, schools, and tech labs still don’t exist, forget advanced features for production facilities.<\/p>\n In the past ten years I’ve also learned quite a bit about the design process, knowledge that fits well with my experience in software and product development at startups. I’m also a point in my career where I can spend some spare time giving back to the open-source software and hardware worlds, and I’ve decided to do that with a new tool for laser cutters and other x\/y tables.<\/p>\n It’s called “warifuru” (\u00e5\u2030\u00b2\u00e6\u0152\u00af\u00e3\u201a\u2039) because of some of the desired features and because I needed a name for a tree better than “the laser cutter project”.<\/p>\n The next few entries on this topic will be on users, desired features, and some skethes. As soon as warifuru can load and cut a DXF file on my lasersaur I’ll open the tree to the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started using laser cutters a decade ago and was a little surprised at the primitive controlling software. Our big-money, brand-name laser cutter came with a printer driver for Windows and nothing else. We did all our work in Illustrator, saved a copy to a flash drive, copied it to the PC in front of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,22,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-digifab","category-warifuru"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.functionalprototype.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}