Well, I finally got to engraving that dragon. I used 2mm aluminium sheet and 0.2mm HSS engraving bit. The result is attached. Thanks for all the advice that you guys gave me. I am now attaching a 2W laser to the front of the engraver/router motor housing - kept cool using a computer CPU heatsink and...

Brynn,
I've just found a similar problem from 2012 on the forum - which seems to pose a solution. See:
viewtopic.php?f=31&t=18344
I will try this method as well as mine.

Sorry for late reply - but despite checking my profile for ticked "notification via email" of replies to forum entries - I don't seem to be getting any notification when people reply. Anyway thanks to heathenx for his recommendations - I will follow these up - although I am becoming increa...

Hi Heathenx, Why do you need to export out of blender to a dxf file? Just curious. Are you using Linux? Yes - I am an out-and-out Linux person and have been since its first struggles into this world. Having been a coder myself in a previous life and also in a scientific community that shared results...

Just when you thought I'd gone away...... My current problem with the dragon image (and I've noticed it with several other of my efforts) is that the bitmap tracing appears to produce two vector products - an inside edge tracing and an outside edge tracing. For intricate engraving patterns I just wa...

Well the plot and the mire gets deeper and I think I will try and surface and head for shore. Yes I've managed to extrude the dragon in Blender (another package I know little about) but then found I couldn't export it to a dxf file format (its in development - coming soon to your PC). I could export...

Hi Brynn, I will follow your advice and ask the Gcodetools forum for help with this. But I've just seen a Youtube video where a complex University Shield photo was converted into a bitmap trace in Inkscape, exported as an SVG file and imported into Blender where the image was converted into an extru...

Yes - very nice heathenx. But I want to do it the other way with the dragon "proud" of the surface and therefore I need to route away the background and I'm struggling to get the area function in Gcodetools to do that. It may be that there are too many paths in the traced image for Gcodeto...

Thanks Brynn for the useful pointers and suggestions. I think I will break the image into several pieces (and into several layers) - based on size and complexity and then do the bitmap tracing. I hope I'm right in guessing that the bitmap tracing converts the bitmap edge to a vector graphic descript...

Hi Brynn, Do you have to change tools completely? Can't you just get a wider router bit? Not sure if "bit" is the right word - maybe "head"? anyway, I thought you could change the "blade"? on routers - whatever you call it, I thought you could just take one off and put ...

Thanks Brynn for your detailed reply. I'm currently using Inkscape 0.48 as Mageia 4 hasn't upgraded to 0.91 yet and I ran into a whole cascade of dependency issues when I tried to install 0.91 from source. The engraving in 0.48 can be found under Extensions>Gcodetools>Engraving as does the Tools Lib...

What process do I need to follow in order to route out the black areas of a bitmap image. Previously, I have converted bitmaps successfully for engraving metal using gcodetools in the following way: Import Bitmap and scale to correct size. Menu: Path > Trace Bitmap Menu: Path > Object to Path Menu: ...

Hi Moini, Your suggestions appeared to have done the trick - and perhaps I have an inkling of what is happening even if I don't know why. If you enclose an area and then "group" you appear to group all the transforms and artefacts as well (that bit I don't understand why). But selecting ea...

Thanks to all for the info regarding possible reasons for the "ghost" gcode images. When you say "use a copy" of the SVG file - how does that produce something different - unless I save it to a different format - perhaps dxf? A straight copy to a different-named SVG file (which I...

Hi brynn, Attached is the recalcitrant svg file that produced the above erroneous engraving code. I have little knowledge of xml except what it is. Regarding the png issue - it might have been a problem except that my successful route via LibreOffice Impress was to produce a png file which was then ...

Update on this problem: I went back to the origianl images and constructed the composite image (Dormouse + Text) in Libreoffice Impress, grouped them and exported to png. Then imported the complete image into inkscape and ran gcodetools. No problem - gcodetools did the conversion perfectly (checked ...

Hi - I'm new to both Inkscape and cnc machining. I'm been trying to get Inkscape and the Gcodetools extension to produce gcode for an engraved image. It all worked fine for the image of the dormouse (see attached image) and I've been able to engrave that successfully with my machine. But then, I ret...