The core underneath
One internal motion program, scaled to the machine's own registers and emitted into the dialect the controller speaks.
The feature set
Every control in the workspace resolves to a number the material answers to
A slider marked quality hides the number it sets. Every control on this page ships with that number in view: the tolerance the geometry is deduplicated at, the coefficients the image is converted on, the ceiling the framing pass runs under, and the cell on the test grid that produced the result you kept. Every figure here is the desktop application as it ships, and every capability below is labelled with the scope it runs in, desktop or marking station, so a number read at a workstation is read as exactly that.
- Five processing modes put energy into the material in five different patterns, so the mode is the decision and the artwork is only the input to it
- The heat map preview draws the generated toolpath in colour by power at up to 3200 by 3200, carries a run time estimate from the calibrated behaviour of the connected machine, and exports as SVG or PNG for a job record
- The test grid sweeps power against speed across up to 20 by 20 cells on one piece of stock, and the cell that produced the result you want becomes the parameter pair on the job in a click
Two bodies of engineering, one geometry engine, and a label on every capability
Desktop capabilities run one machine, one job at a time, from a workstation. That covers the geometry engine, the vector and raster pipelines, the controller adapters and power mapping, code generation, the heat map preview and the framing pass, streaming and recovery, material and project persistence, and licensing that completes every state transition offline. Every capability below belongs there unless its row says marking station.
Marking station capabilities belong to a line, and they are specified, commissioned and accepted on it. That is where the Light Lane Control Layer reads the PLC tag identifying the physical part at the head, pulls the job, batch or serial out of the system that already holds it, composes Data Matrix to ISO/IEC 16022 graded to ISO/IEC 15415 for that individual part, fires inside the window the part gives you, and writes the completion back against the job with timestamp, operator, machine and station.
One geometry engine and one code generator sit under both, which is why a tolerance published for a job on a bench is the same tolerance governing a mark on a moving chain. The label is what keeps a specification true when this page gets forwarded to somebody who buys lines rather than seats.
Six stages, and the decision each one settles
A stage exists here because something physical gets decided at it. The description says what the stage does to the geometry, and the note underneath says what the stage is protecting.
- Step 1
Import and creation, with the source markup left as it arrived
PNG, JPEG, BMP and SVG import with drag and drop, text on system fonts with bold, italic and letter spacing control, eight preset shapes, a freeform custom shape tool, and QR codes and linear barcodes generated in the application. An SVG arrives as a hierarchical sublayer tree, so a fifteen layer drawing from a customer has individual elements shown, hidden, nudged, scaled or made semi-transparent in place.
Why it matters: Each edit is written to its own dictionary and composited only when the job renders, tracking identifiers are injected so an edit survives a re-render, parsing is deferred to idle callbacks and cached per image, and every position is clamped inside the viewBox. The composited tree is what the generator consumes, so the drawing you were sent is still the drawing you were sent after an afternoon of adjustments.
- Step 2
Pick the processing mode, because the mode picks the physics
Vector outline traces the edge contours for line work and open shapes. Vector fill lays scanlines into dark regions for solid logos. Raster grayscale varies power per pixel for continuous tone. Raster threshold cuts a binary result at a configurable luminance value. Raster dither turns tone into binary structure through Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson or Bayer.
Why it matters: One file, five modes, five different physical results, because each mode leaves a different pattern of energy in the material. Per-image brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation and gamma shape the input under a live preview, and the mode decides what the machine does with what comes out.
- Step 3
Read the toolpath, not the artwork
The heat map preview renders the generated toolpath in colour by power at up to 3200 by 3200, with a run time estimate drawn from the calibrated behaviour of the machine profile in use. Preview and generated code both export as SVG or PNG when a job needs a record or a handover to someone else.
Why it matters: A tonal photograph and its toolpath look nothing alike, and it is the toolpath the machine executes. Power is the variable the material responds to, so power is the variable the preview is drawn in.
- Step 4
Place it to the millimetre, then prove the placement with the beam
Millimetre accurate position and rotation, snap to grid and to bed edges, and quick alignment to any corner or centre hold the job inside the work envelope. The framing pass then traces the job boundary on the material itself, emitted in constant power mode and clamped to a maximum of 10 percent.
Why it matters: A clean job in the second best spot is scrap, and on a premium blank there is one attempt. The 10 percent ceiling is the reason an alignment preview stays an alignment preview.
- Step 5
Characterise the material on the machine that will run it
The test grid generator sweeps power against speed across up to 20 by 20 cells on one piece of stock, monitored live while it runs, and the cell that produced the result you want is applied to the job in one click. 17 built-in material presets cover wood, acrylic, leather, paper, fabric and metal, and custom materials carry their own parameter sets.
Why it matters: Two machines of the same model behave differently once they have run some hours, and the same sheet of ply behaves differently between suppliers. What comes off the grid is a written pair against a named material rather than a setting held in somebody's head.
- Step 6
Save the pair, then run it again in six months
Machine profiles and templates hold layout, placeholders, cut line overlays and material settings together, and import or export to move between machines. Step and repeat lays a batch out on a grid of up to 20 by 20. Repeat count runs the same emitted program for multiple passes where depth needs it. Projects autosave, live streaming shows progress against the emitted program, and a dry run traces the whole path with the beam off.
Why it matters: A good result that lives in one person's memory is a result you get once. Written parameters are how it survives a shift change.
Under each mode, the arithmetic that produced the result
Every control described above sits on a pipeline whose coefficients and tolerances are published, because a tolerance is checkable and an adjective is not.
Radiometry on one side, cutting order on the other
Raster work is a radiometric problem, so the pipeline converts to linear luminance before any adjustment lands and the exposure controls act on light rather than on pixels. Vector work is a cutting order problem, so the geometry is deduplicated, simplified and sequenced before a single move is emitted. Path order is arithmetic here rather than preference, because a part that leaves the sheet before its inner detail is drawn does not go back into the nest.
- The raster path converts sRGB to linear luminance on the Rec.709 coefficients 0.2126R plus 0.7152G plus 0.0722B, then reads subject statistics with percentile clipping at the 0.5th and 99.5th before auto levels, exposure, contrast around the 0.5 midpoint and gamma are applied. The image is handled as a light source rather than as a picture, which is what makes the adjustment controls behave predictably on a material that reacts to energy
- Three dither error models, chosen against the substrate: Floyd-Steinberg spreading error to four neighbours at 7/16, 3/16, 5/16 and 1/16 under serpentine scanning, Atkinson passing one eighth of the error to each of six neighbours and dropping the remainder to lift contrast, and Bayer thresholding on a fixed 4 by 4 matrix to produce regular clusters. Exposure bias of plus or minus 0.3 is applied to luminance before diffusion
- Vector geometry runs ten stages before emission: normalisation, undirected edge dedup at 0.01 mm, short segment removal below 0.03 mm, connected path building on a 0.20 mm snap with greedy head and tail extension, collinear merging by cross product, Douglas-Peucker simplification at 0.05 mm, closed loop detection at 0.20 mm, ordering, closed path rotation to the nearest approach point, and travel insertion
- Ordering is where the physical insight sits: closed paths run by descending signed area so the outer contour is drawn ahead of the inner detail, open paths run by nearest neighbour with direction-aware reversal, and each closed path is rotated to its nearest approach point before travel moves are inserted
- Raster rows are emitted serpentine with 2.5 mm overscan so the head is already at velocity when a row starts, on modal feed, with inline power quantised into 50 steps on every move
Explore more
First job
Install, connect the machine, and take a real piece of work through the six stages above.
The preview is drawn in power, and the framing pass is clamped so it stays a preview
Two features on this page exist to move a mistake off the material: one puts it on a screen at 3200 by 3200, the other puts it on the beam at a power the material does not react to.
What the framing pass does to the material
It leaves it as it found it. The generated program is parsed for laser-on coordinates, rasterised to a 300 pixel binary mask, closed up by a dilate then an erode at radius 2, boundary traced on Moore neighbourhood 8-connectivity, and simplified with Douglas-Peucker at 0.5 mm. Where a trace refuses to close, Andrew's monotone chain returns a convex hull and is guaranteed to terminate. The pass then runs in constant power mode, clamped to a maximum of 10 percent. Two algorithms, a fallback and a hard power ceiling, on the feature whose whole job is drawing an outline. That is the standard everywhere else in the core.
- The heat map preview renders the generated toolpath colour coded by power at up to 3200 by 3200, so a setting is checked at screen resolution before material and machine time are committed
- The run time estimate comes from the calibrated behaviour of the selected machine rather than from a nominal feed rate, so a job length quoted to a customer reflects the device in the room
- Preview and generated code both export as SVG or PNG, which is how a job carries a record or moves to somebody else without a screenshot
- Millimetre accurate position and rotation, snap to grid and to bed edges, and quick alignment to any corner or centre keep the job inside the work envelope
- A dry run traces the whole path with the beam off, for the jobs where fixture clearance matters as much as the geometry
Explore more
Download the build
The current build for your operating system, with the 14 day trial started from inside the app.
Pricing
Which tier carries templates, step and repeat, material testing and calibration.
Machine readable codes, validated at entry rather than at the scanner
Codes are generated in the application against the job in front of you, and the parameters that decide whether a scanner reads them are set deliberately rather than left at a default.
Error correction moves with the artwork
A centre logo embeds at 5 to 29 percent of symbol size, and error correction steps up to level H automatically the moment one is enabled, because putting a logo in the middle of a symbol means deliberately destroying part of it. A symbol that grades out at the scanner has already cost you the part it is marked on.
- Square, rounded and dot module styles on QR, centre logo embedding anywhere from 5 to 29 percent of symbol size, and error correction stepped to level H the moment a logo is switched on
- Five linear symbologies: Code 128 and Code 39 for internal identifiers, EAN-13 and UPC-A for retail, and ITF-14 for the outer case. Input is validated as it is typed
- A generated symbol runs the same vector path as the rest of the job, so its module edges are deduplicated at 0.01 mm, ordered and emitted on the tolerances published above
- Data Matrix to ISO/IEC 16022, graded to ISO/IEC 15415, is composed on a marking station from the plant's own record for the individual part at the head. It is written into an acceptance specification, commissioned and signed off on the line
Related pages
The record architecture
How an identifier is composed for an individual part and written back against the job that owns it.
Controller support
The status of each emission path, and what moves between GRBL, Marlin, Smoothieware and Generic.
One grid, one piece of stock, and the pair that worked goes into the job
Parameters come off the machine in the room and the stock on the shelf, rather than out of a table written against somebody else's ply on somebody else's machine.
What the grid produces
A sweep of power against speed across up to 20 by 20 cells on a single piece of stock, watched live as it runs, with the chosen cell applied to the job in a click. What comes out is a parameter pair written against a named material, which is what a repeat order gets run from six months later.
- 17 built-in material presets across wood, acrylic, leather, paper, fabric and metal, with custom materials carrying their own parameter sets
- Machine profiles hold setup, defaults and behaviour against the actual device, so moving a job to a second machine carries the context with it
- Estimate calibration tunes run time estimates against the measured behaviour of your machine, including repeat passes and the feed rates the controller reports back
- Emission follows the dialect the selected controller speaks, GRBL, Marlin, Smoothieware or Generic, with the power scale read off the machine's own registers at connect time rather than assumed from a category average
- Ruida runs through an external bridge under the alpha label, so validate it against your own controller and your own job set before it carries a customer order
Related pages
Controller support
Power models, curve handling, streaming discipline and the status label on every path.
Getting started
The first hour: install, connect, and put a first job through the preview.
Capability, the scope it runs in, and its status label
The scope column is the one to read first. A desktop capability is switched on in the application. A marking station capability is written into an acceptance specification and signed off on your line.
| Capability | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Import, sublayer editing, and creation of text, shapes and codes in the application | Desktop application | Supported |
| Five processing modes on the published vector tolerances and raster coefficients | Desktop application | Supported |
| Heat map preview at up to 3200 by 3200, with SVG and PNG export | Desktop application | Supported |
| Framing pass, constant power, clamped to 10 percent, with a convex hull fallback | Desktop application | Supported |
| Material test grid, material presets, machine profiles and templates | Desktop application | Supported, with templates, step and repeat, testing and calibration on the Pro tier |
| QR and five linear symbologies, generated against the job in front of you | Desktop application | Supported |
| Emission into GRBL, Marlin, Smoothieware and Generic G-code | Desktop application | Supported |
| Ruida, driven through an external bridge rather than a core adapter | Desktop application | Alpha |
| Arc fitting by Kasa algebraic least squares, on the GRBL path | Desktop application | Experimental |
| Data Matrix to ISO/IEC 16022, graded to ISO/IEC 15415 | Marking station | Specified and accepted per line |
| Composition per part from a PLC tag and the job, batch or serial in your ERP or MES | Marking station | Specified and accepted per line |
What makes the tenth run of a job identical to the first
Repeat work is where a parameter set earns back the hour it took to find.
- Templates hold layout, placeholders, cut line overlays and material settings together, and import or export to move a job between machines
- Step and repeat lays a batch out on a grid of up to 20 by 20, so an order of a hundred plates is one job file rather than a hundred placements
- Repeat count runs the same emitted program for multiple passes where depth needs it, without the job being rebuilt
- Projects autosave, and live streaming shows progress against the emitted program while it runs
- A dry run traces the whole path with the beam off, and the stop system carries three levels, with the recovery sequence restoring the user origin before work resumes
- Emitted output stays stable between releases under the golden fixture suite and the conformance validator, published in full on the controller page
Status labels on the feature set, stated exactly
Confirmed
- Import, creation, the five processing modes, the heat map preview, placement and framing are supported paths, and they earn their keep on the first job you ever run
- Templates, step and repeat, the material test grid and estimate calibration sit on the Pro tier, and they are what repeat production is built on
- Arc fitting carries the Experimental label and is gated on five conditions holding at once: a sweep of at least 15 degrees, at least 8 segments, consecutive segments within 0.12 mm, radial error under 0.08 mm and radius deviation under 1.5 percent. A full circle splits into two semicircles, and an arc over 180 degrees splits in half
Not confirmed
- Ruida is an alpha path through the external bridge, so keep production work on the emitted dialects and run a validation pass against the specific controller in front of you before a workflow rests on it
- Arc emission stays a path to evaluate against your own geometry while the Experimental label is on it, with production work on the line segment path
- Data Matrix to ISO/IEC 16022 belongs to a marking station, composed for the individual part from the plant's own record, rather than to a toggle in the desktop application
Questions about the feature set, answered with the constants
What does the heat map preview render, and at what resolution?
The generated toolpath, colour coded by power, at up to 3200 by 3200, with a run time estimate taken from the calibrated behaviour of the selected machine. Preview and generated code both export as SVG or PNG for a job record. A tonal photograph and its toolpath look nothing alike, and it is the toolpath the machine executes, so the preview is drawn in the variable the material responds to.
Which files import, and what is created in the application?
PNG, JPEG, BMP and SVG import directly, including drag and drop from the file manager, and anything else is converted to one of those first. Text on system fonts, eight preset shapes, a freeform custom shape tool, QR codes and five linear symbologies are all created in the application, which covers most of the work that would otherwise be a round trip through a drawing package. An imported SVG keeps its layer hierarchy, so elements are adjusted in place and the original markup is merged rather than overwritten.
Which dither model suits a coarse substrate?
Bayer, in most cases. Its 4 by 4 ordered threshold matrix produces clustered structures that a beam with a finite spot size can actually resolve, where an error diffused result puts down isolated single pixel dots that a coarse material will not hold. Floyd-Steinberg spreads error to four neighbours at 7/16, 3/16, 5/16 and 1/16 under serpentine scanning and holds the finest tonal detail on a smooth substrate. Atkinson passes one eighth of the error to each of six neighbours and drops the remainder, which lifts contrast. On a laser this is a materials decision.
Does the desktop application compose Data Matrix from our ERP job data?
That capability belongs to a marking station. There the Light Lane Control Layer reads the PLC tag identifying the part at the head, pulls the job, batch or serial out of the system that already holds it, composes Data Matrix to ISO/IEC 16022 graded to ISO/IEC 15415 for that part, and writes the completion back against the job. It is specified, commissioned and accepted on the line. The desktop application generates QR codes and five linear symbologies against the job in front of you, on the same geometry engine and the same code generator.
How does a proven job move to a second machine?
Through the profile and the template rather than through memory. Machine profiles hold setup, defaults and behaviour against the actual device, templates hold layout, placeholders, cut line overlays and material settings together, and both import and export. The power scale is read off the second machine's own registers at connect time rather than carried across from the first, so the same intent is emitted at that machine's real range.
Which features sit on the Pro tier?
Templates, step and repeat, the material test grid, estimate calibration and the deeper machine-aware tools. Import, creation, the five processing modes, the heat map preview, placement and framing run on both tiers. The pricing page states which tier carries what.
What is worth running on the first job rather than the hundredth?
Import, the processing modes, the heat map preview and the placement tools pay for themselves on job one, because they are what stops material being committed to a setting nobody has checked. Templates, testing and step and repeat compound as the work becomes repeatable, which is why they sit together on the same tier.
Put one real job through all six stages
Start the 14 day trial and take a piece of work you already have the whole way through: import it, choose the mode, read the generated toolpath in the heat map preview, frame it on the material, and run a test grid on the stock you actually hold. The parameter pair that comes out the other side is written against your material, on your machine, and it is yours to keep.
Last updated August 21, 2026