New K40 owner. I’ve been playing around with it for about 5 days now. I’m pretty impressed with it’s ability to engrave and vectorize wood. I also had some success engraving sandstone river rock. Have not had much luck with glass.
Anyway, have the version with the water temp meter and my only upgrade at this point I is a 3d printed chain guide and air assist. I’m using inkscape and K40 whisperer.
My biggest issue at this point is determining the correct starting location for prints. It’s not an issue if I’m printing something I’m cutting, but I’ve cut some log discs out of maple and it’s challenging figuring out where to home the laser to get perfect placement. I’ve seen mods that have diode laser crosshairs but that only give me a start point. Is there any option to have the laser draw an outline or bounding box prior to starting the cut?
Best suggestion I can give is to open K40 Whisperer and manually move the head to a spot that looks about right for your top left corner, tracking how many steps you take from the top and from the left. Tap the test button so you can mark the spot (and tell where your top left most corner is actually at in relation to where the machine’s top left most cornern is. Take into consideration that the exaust opening (at least for mine, so I expect for others as well) MAY overlap your laser’s work area and cut off a couple of mm of space at the top. Use that as a means to make a base template in inkscape to paste your images onto and place as necessary.
You just take a piece off plywood and push it into the top left corner of the bed. The exact size doesn’t matter just that it overlaps the 0,0 origin in the x & y directions. Then set cut lines running from the origin in the x & y directions that exceed the length of the wood in each direction. So when you cut them out you are left with a corner that allows you to always place the piece you are working on at the 0,0 position.