So I picked up one of those cheap Chinese Laser engravers from e-bay. Seems pretty cool so far but MoshiDraw is what it is. It does come with a package called "CorelLaser" which integrates with Corel Draw. Well, I used to be a big Corel Draw user but left it behind in favor of Inkscape a long time ago. As far as I'm aware, Inkscape is not able to drive these plotters directly. So I'm wondering if it would be possible to create some kind of a shim to allow this Corel Laser package to work with Inkscape. Presumably it is designed to hook into a Corel Draw API (hopefully documented) as some kind of DLL or ActiveX type object so it shouldn't be beyond reason to hook it in somehow (Inkscape being open source and all).

Does this sound reasonable or am I barking up the wrong tree? (to be clear, I'm a programmer and willing to take a look at this myself. Just want to make sure I'm not going over well-worn ground or missing something obvious).

I'm thinking it may not even need a shim

It looks to me like the engraving module is the same between MoshiDraw and CorelLaser. This means it is probably a DLL. Looking at the CorelLaser instructions, it seems that the DLL is probably instantiated and passed WMF data for engraving and/or HP-GL for the cutting. I don't think it should be too hard to do the same from Inkscape. So it should just be a case of working out the API.

Hi.

Why not make an extension for Inkscape that "speaks" to the Laser engraver directly?

Have a look at these;
http://www.openbuilds.com/builds/laser- ... nsion.515/
http://atxhs.org/wiki/Using_Inkscape_wi ... ser_Cutter
http://thelittlebox.co/theforum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=27
http://www.razorlab.co.uk/need-help/get ... /inkscape/
https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/vi ... serCutting

Good Luck.
RGDS
Ragnar

Well, that would involve knowing whatever language it is that the diver is talking to the cutter (not insurmountable but a fair bit of work) and then there is the fact that the driver works for several different boards so making it work once should make it work for several devices instead of having to code or each. Then again, once documented, it is possible that it could be integrated with other software and not just Inkscape.

The main issue, after all, is that Moshidraw is pretty crappy and Corel Draw is $$$. The driver itself seems fairly reasonable.

Hi.

From searching the net it seems that the board in your laser engraver uses a subset of HPGL (Hewlett Packard Graphics Language).
Some users of these laser engraver have changed the controller board to get rid of MoshiDraw and use a board that understands "industry standard" G-Code.
You can then feed your laser engraver vector images instead of bitmaps using either Linux-CNC (free) or Mach3, Inkscape is capable of producing G-Code.

Have a look at these;
http://www.thinkhaus.org/2010/06/24/how ... -cutter-2/
http://forum.planet-cnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=127
http://www.synthfool.com/laser/
http://hackaday.com/2012/12/13/converti ... ith-mach3/

RGDS
Ragnar

I'll take a look. Not really looking to change out the board at this stage but it's not out of the question.