Andrew-Dickinson / photonic-etcher

Generate exposure masks for Anycubic printers from PCB Gerbers
https://andrew-dickinson.github.io/photonic-etcher
MIT License
87 stars 11 forks source link

Support for importing PNGs #7

Open mathcampbell opened 1 year ago

mathcampbell commented 1 year ago

it be possible to implement a PNG importer? I know most people are usiong this to do PCB etching but I'd like to etch actual bitmaps onto a piece of metal and a striaght PNG improter would be helpful. Thanks

Andrew-Dickinson commented 1 year ago

Can you explain a bit more about your use case? One concern I have with bitmaps is that the Photon screens are mostly monochrome, which means if you want to etch non-binary pixel data you'll need to do it using exposure time. That is definitely possible using the file formats we write to, but it's not easy to do with how we've set things up. I don't think greyscale support is something we would ever introduce into this project, since it has very little relevance for PCB manufacturing

digiexchris commented 1 year ago

I have a use-case, etching something like this onto an aluminum plate. It's monochrome already. Making reproduction machinery name plates. I'd love to use my photon as a generic photolithography device. image

Andrew-Dickinson commented 1 year ago

Yep that sort of use case does seem like a good thing for us to support. I don't have a ton of bandwidth for this project these days, but I'll leave this issue open to track the feature request

mathcampbell commented 1 year ago

Arrhhh sorry I never saw the first reply to this!

My use case is actually etching brass & silver for jewellery (but also signage, so same as the other reply!)

I have found a way to “hack” it using an online generator but it’s pretty hacky and hasn’t always worked. A specific “png to photon” tool would be stellar

Math

On Sat, Aug 5, 2023 at 10:54 PM Andrew Dickinson @.***> wrote:

Yep that sort of use case does seem like a good thing for us to support. I don't have a ton of bandwidth for this project these days, but I'll leave this issue open to track the feature request

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