NEJE Laser Engraving Machines are compact and cheap options for those who want to approach the laser engraving hobby, however, when it comes to the software, NEJE has done a very poor job with it.
Although we can easily set up engravings, we are limited to the large yet unsortable image gallery available within the software.
If we want to engrave custom designs the software accepts .nc (type of gcode) and .dxf (type of cad) files, which In turn require you to download and learn other software.
Luckily for us, Inkscape is not a hard software, and we can learn simple sketching tools in a matter of minutes, however, the design has to be extracted in a format that is not native for Inkscape and we need to download some plugins for it.
You can watch the video to see how to set all up and engrave custom projects or continue reading to learn how to set up Inkscape.
Before going ahead we will need to download and install Inkscape like any regular software, however, it is important to install version 0.92.4 to ensure that the plugins will work.
If you already have Inkscape installed on your machine, check the version from “Help > About Inkscape”
Installing Inkscape Plugins
The first step is to download the plugins through the button below
Once the file is downloaded you will need to extract the files and to paste them into the extension directory of the Inkscape folder as shown in the screenshot below {C:\Program Files\Inkscape\share\extensions}
Once the plugins are in place, launch or restart Inkscape.
Then you will need to go to your root folder most likely C, create a new folder and name it “output”.
Exporting .nc in Inkscape
This post is not an Inkscape tutorial so I won’t go over the design but I assume that you finished your design.
Once the design is finalized select it and convert it to a path from Path > Object, then go over to Extensions > Laseregraving > Laser, and under the Laser tab simply change the name of the file leaving the .nc after the name.
You should end up with the file in the output folder we set at the beginning
Note: you must be in the laser tab of the laser wizard, like in the screenshot above to be able to apply.