Carving .svg photo's with x-carve

Alan if you are asking me, I’m no help. I’m as last as a goose right now! :slight_smile:

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Yes, your wrong. Look at the gallery page for Lithophanes done with a spindle using PicEngrave. Wood photo engravings would be the same process except inverted depths of cut based on shades of the image.

PeterJames, I have been at this most of the afternoon and as far as I can tell my XP system will not run this UGS software? So my next move is a trip to my local Bestbuy to purchase an windows upgrade software package. If I am wrong please give me your thought on this. I will be going out later this afternoon to the store.

@JamesMitchell Hmm, I don’t have an XP box handy anymore, but I’m not sure we’re quite at the end of our rope just yet.

Give me a sec to see if there are any known issues running UGS inside of Windows XP. In the meantime, let’s check how the java install went on your Windows XP machine.

Can you:

  • Go to the XP machine, and hit the “Windows” key + r (that should pop up a little “Run” dialog box)
  • Type in cmd and hit enter (that should bring up a black command prompt window)
  • In the command prompt window, type java and hit enter

Either it’s going to print out a bunch of stuff, which means java’s installed, or it’s going to say something like “‘java’ is not recognized as an internal or external command”, which is fine, that will tell us our next step :smile:

hello agin, did as you suggested and the following result; ‘java’ is not reconized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Right, I just finally put 2 and 2 together! It was presumptuous of me to assume that you were working on a newer 64-bit machine, I gave you the wrong version of java to install.

Here’s the link you want:

http://javadl.sun.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=107098

which will download a file called “jre-8u45-windows-i586”

and that should work on your computer. Try installing that, and then firing up our old buddy “start-windows.bat” and see if that does the trick

yes, mine is a 32 bit device. I think I will upgrade anyway just to prevent any more trouble and bring this computer into the 21st century.

Well, if your machine is from the XP era, you’re still going to have to use the 32-bit version, so I still would have steered you wrong :wink:

I will also download this latest version when I return. If it is not too late this evening I will call you again or wait until tomorrow. Again thank you for your assistance!

Ok, your call on updating your OS. I know XP is actually popular with the older CNC setups. I wouldn’t mind taking one last crack at getting UGS working with the new java download before you upgrade, if you don’t mind.

doesn’t look as if I can install win 8.1 on this xp pc. So I have just installed the latest version of Java you gave me and I,m gonna give it a rest for the night. Will try getting up with you tomorrow by telephone. Didn’t realize you were in the Austin area, maybe that’s why you’ve been so helpful, being from Texas ans all! ")

You will have to run an older version of Java on XP the newer versions will not run on it. I have an XP machine in my outside garage connected to my machine and am running “jre-7u75-windows-i586.exe” or “jre-7u75-windows-x64.exe” (don’t remember which I installed just off the top of my head).

I think I read somewhere that this is the last version of Java supported for XP.

Scott

@JamesMitchell I gave you early access to the image vectorizer in the Easel App Store.

Click the smiley face, then click apps, then click the vectorizer and upload your raster photo.

If you already have the vector image as an SVG you can import it in the file menu.

@ScottWillis Good info, thanks for that!

That means the version of java we want is this one:

http://javadl.sun.com/webapps/download/AutoDL?BundleId=106367

which will give us a file called “jre-7u79-windows-i586.exe”, then you can install that and try the “start-windows.bat” file again. I mean, one of these days, it’s bound to work :wink:

@Zach_Kaplan thanks for hooking him up with the beta access, but I think Easel does the standard “image to vector” conversion like Inkscape does, right? James is trying to get good results from a photo, which is why I started him down this path, here was the result of his earlier attempt.

Yes the i586 version is the one you want with XP.
There were some 64 bit versions of XP out but I did not have it on my old dell laptop I run the machine with. 64 bit XP had/has a lot of issues.

I also use the 1.08 version of UGS on the XP machine and it works fine.

I can get this far in this tutorial, but for some reason when I try to reset my position with “reset zero” in UGS, it says, “G10 P0 X0 Y0 Z0 true true error: Unsupported command”

Not sure why… Any thoughts?

@peterjames I watched the video and I think @JamesMitchell might be looking for a line drawing?

There has been some talk of someone making a relief image app that could be added to Easel. That would produce a carve that looked more like a photo than a line drawing.

@JamesMitchell Could you upload the photo you were initially trying to carve?

ok, just did I think? Now what?

Hmm, it’s not showing up. Can you reply to this thread, then use the button here:

which should bring up a little window, and then you can pick “choose file” and go to the photo, and it should upload it into the comments here.