M2 Nano Board Shoulder Effect on Stamps

Hello all,

Im trying to use my K40 to create some stamps. However, I have seen other boards as Cohesion + Lightburn been able to create the shoulder effect to create stamps. Something like this:

Who here produces rubber stamps - Community Laser Talk - LightBurn Software Forum

I wanted to know if this was possible with the M2, either using K40 Whisperer or Meerk40t

Others will probably respond… I have/do not create stamps.
I do know that the stock K40 was originally designed to do stamps.

If I understand this correctly you want to create a rounded edge in the z direction. This would require varying the power of the laser as it rasters. Unfortunately the m2 nano control board isn’t capable of doing this. You would need a different type of control board.

It might be possible to do it as a second pass overlay with a thin dithered engraving over the edge.

Actually, meerk40t should be able to do it because @Tatarize implemented PPI dithering on the software side; it’s basically what a hardware board would be doing anyway.

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Its exactly what I was thinking to do but I would need to make everything much bigger so the dithering does not raster the design itself!

I’ve been reading about this on Meerk40t but I’m unsure how to perform this. @Tatarize I would be deeply grateful if you can help me pull this through!

Strictly speaking if you really want 3d effect, the PPI won’t be enough. You can certainly vary a bit, but you don’t get real depth. You either hit a spot with some photons or you don’t with the M2. PPI is going to maybe do shading but not actual physical depth.

That’s not to say there’s not a solution. Just that it’s a bit weird. What you want is a z-raster. Various people have come up with this before but basically you raster over the stamp not once but several times. You might need some practice to get this right, but if you right click an image in MeerK40t there’s an option for ZDepth Divide. This will let you split a grey image into several images for different passes. Each with a different banding of the gray. So the darker the gray the more passes it gets. This will actually hit each spot with different amounts of light. And if you’re not just doing on/off stuff you’d want something like this.

It’s pretty easy to see how you’d do this yourself too. You want to hit the deepest cuts with the most passes and slightly fewer passes for the less deep stuff, etc.

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Thank you so much. I’ll give it a go and see how it goes!

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