Laser Cutting Circuit Diagrams In Plywood Using Inkscape

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This circuit diagram was designed in Inkscape with all of the electrical symbols taken from the WikiMedia commons electrical symbol library. It’s got transistors, voltage sources, LEDs, resistors etc all in SVG format.

There are a few steps in Inkscape to convert a circuit diagram to something that can be laser cut.

Step 1: Convert everything to a path using the stroke to path option (found in path>stroke to path). Take a look at these pictures to get an idea of what this does.

Take these two images, they both look the same in normal view mode, but viewing them in ‘outline’ mode is effectively what the laser cutter works off.
stroke-no-stroke

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This example is just a resistor taken from the wikimedia commons library and line attached to either end of the resistor. The lines are red just so you can differentiate them from the resistor. Notice in the stroke only image its a single line which is not what we want. We want to cut out the outline of the shape – the stroke to path option does this.

We’re not home free yet though – if you look at the stroke to path outline image you can see where the lines and resistor meet are still seperate entities. We want to combine them into a single line. This is done using the ‘union’ tool found in path>union. You can only select two items at a time to ‘union’ together so doing a whole circuit diagram is a little tedious. Take a look at the image below to see what the image looks like after the ‘union’ tool has been applied:

 

That’s it! circuit diagram is now good to laser cut. union-ex

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Circuit diagram viewed in ‘outline’ mode:

diagram-outline-mode

 

Circuit diagram viewed in ‘normal’ mode:

diagram-normal

Click Here to download SVG of circuit diagram

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