Carving .svg photo's with x-carve

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Does anyone have some positive advice on how to carve a photo with x-carve?

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Give this a try, I think it’s what you’re looking for (and it has a free trial):

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Thanks PeterJames for the input. I am looking at this software already, just concerned with how long the ‘trial’ period is and then what’s it going to cost to purchase it? Any ideas on that? Also trying to figure out what good importing svg files into easel is if all it’s going to do is a flat top to bottom rendering?

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$150 - Products Compare Page | Vectric

And don’t think of it as “import photo”, it’s more for importing a two-color image, so you can take something like this:

and make something like this:

[edit] Also you’re going to want to invest in some v-bits if you’re looking to do photo work, check out the thread here:

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I purchased two ‘V’ bits with my x-carve, if I remember correctly I have a 60 and 90 degree bits. Anxious to try them out. I will down load the free trial v carve tomorrow.

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I use LinuxCNC and it has a very good Image2Gcode generator built in. If I load in an image, rather than a g-code file, it bring up the program. Lots of options and things to tweak with. I have not had a chance to try it yet but I will as soon as my X-Carve is back up.

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sorry to hijack the thread but ive been looking for a linux cnc gshield tutorial i know its serial based but how do i set up the pinout for the gshield serial shield?

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@AndrewBishop This would make for an excellent new thread :smile:

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Ok, Peter you know from my posts I am a new-bee at all of this cnc stuff. So I down loaded the vcarve free trial of photo carve and followed all the tutorials. Once I have saved a file how do I get it from my hard drive to easel?

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Hah @JamesMitchell, no worries, we’ll get you through this. The bad news is that Easel can’t run the files that Photo V-Carve produces. The good news is that there are a couple of free options that you can use, like Universal Gcode Sender (UGS).

Here’s some more info on that: Using Grbl · grbl/grbl Wiki · GitHub

When I get home today I’ll see about getting Photo V-Carve set up on my machine and see if I can give you some better step-by-step instructions.

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thanks, much appreciated!

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Ok, I got a chance to play around with the demo. It looks like the demo allows you to do two things: take a picture and set it up to be processed by PhotoVCarve (but not save the gcode), and take one of the existing four pictures, run it through the process, and actually generate the gcode.

I recommend you take one of the demo images (baby, woman, big ben, puppies), and run it through the steps. You can play around with all the options to see what does what, or just use the defaults, since the demo projects are already set up pretty well. The software is geared for a more general audience, so it does a nice job of leading you through once you start going.

Once you get to the last step, in the dropdown box of Post Processors (at the bottom), select either “G Code Inch” or “G Code mm”, and save the .tap file. Once you get that, we can move on to using UGS!

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Sounds good, btw, what is UGS?

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Universal G-code Sender, that’s what the link in my last project goes to, it’s one of the options for taking gcode that a program like PhotoVCarve makes, and running it on your machine.

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All righty then, I’m headed to my pc now and playing around with vcarve photo!

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Ok PeterJames, I’ve saved the puppies to the .tap file, now what?

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Ok, next is UGS. Download it here:

http://bit.ly/1BSKon6

Which will download a zip file onto your computer. Once that’s downloaded, right-click on it and select “Extract All…” and just take the default options.

It should then open up a window showing these files (it might not show the part after the . ):

README.txt
start.sh
start-windows.bat
UniversalGcodeSender.jar

Go ahead and click on start-windows.bat. There’s every chance that a black window will just flash and go away. That’s fine, it means we need to install Java, which we’ll do in the next step if you need to.

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Ok, if you clicked start-windows and you see UGS:

you can skip this step.

If the window just flashes by when you run the start-windows file, that’s ok, you need to install java.

Click here:

http://javadl.sun.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=107100

And it should download the 64-bit version of java. Once it’s downloaded, run the file and it will install java. Then try the start-windows file again, and it should start up UGS.

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ok, I got the start-windows.bat but when I click on it nothing seems to happen.

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should I download the java script anyway?