Lightburn - Unleash xTool D1 Pro Potential

Setting Up Your XTool D1 Pro Laser Engraver and Cutter: A Beginner's Guide

Before we get started with setting up our laser engraver, let's take a quick look at what we need to do. We want to make sure that it is focused, so I'm going to pull the kickstand down and adjust until we're touching our surface again. This will ensure that our laser is properly aligned and ready for use.

To focus the laser, we'll use the extended z-axis arm on the XTool D1 Pro. You can access this arm by releasing the clamps at the bottom of the arm and moving it up and down. Once we're focused, we'll manually place the laser where we want it to start. In this case, we've decided to place it about 70 millimeters from our surface.

Now that we have our laser set up, let's talk about how to prepare for our engraving and cutting process. We'll need to import an image into the XTool software. I'm just going to use a simple logo image, but you can choose any image you like. I've resized this image to 70 millimeters in size, as we want it to be small enough not to take too long to engrave.

Next, we'll need to select the correct tracing method for our image. We'll right-click on the image and select "Trace Image" from the dropdown menu. This will automatically generate a path for our laser to follow. Now, let's remove the original image and use the new tracing as our path.

We've also created a second path using a circle tool. I've set this circle to 75 millimeters in size and placed it on another path. By doing so, we'll have both an engraving path and a cutting path for our design. This will allow us to create intricate designs with both laser engraving and cutting.

Now that we have our paths set up, let's talk about settings for our engraving and cutting process. We'll select the pink option by double-clicking on it in the XTool software. For the engrave setting, we want to set our speed to 80 millimeters per second and our power to 50%. Don't worry too much about these settings – you can adjust them as needed.

For our cutting process, we'll select a different path using the blue option. We want to cut through the material quickly, so we'll set our speed to 5 millimeters per second and our power to max (100%). Now that our settings are selected, let's move on to the laser screen.

One important setting to note is whether your laser uses Absolute coordinates or current position. In this case, we want to change it to current position because it will start from wherever you manually place the laser head. You can select the upper-left-hand corner as your job origin by clicking on it. A green dot will appear at that location, indicating where the laser will start.

Before starting our engraving process, it's a good idea to frame our piece in the XTool software. This will ensure that our laser is properly aligned with our material. To do this, we'll click the "Frame" button and let the laser run its course. Once everything is complete, we can hit the "Start" button to begin our engraving process.

As a token of appreciation for sticking around until the end of this video, I'd like to give an extra special thumbs up to all my patrons. If you're interested in supporting the channel and helping me continue to create content, be sure to check out my Patreon page linked below. I also want to thank all my top-tier patrons (including Steven Mann, Andy the Viking, Todd Stewart, Jason Ayers, read means Tina Porter, Derek Steele, voltage, and Frank the Tank Johnson) for their generous contributions.

If contributing monetarily isn't your thing, be sure to check out my Discord channel links below. There's a lot of great conversation happening over there, and we're always talking about lasers – kids! So, be sure to join in on the fun and don't forget to subscribe to the channel for more laser engraver and cutter content.

Now that we've completed our beginner's guide to setting up the XTool D1 Pro, it's time to put our new skills to the test. Watch as I create my first laser-engraved piece with this amazing machine!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enanybody ever ride the ball with a with a liquid death before don't show that your kids what's up cupcakes it is January and I'm pretty sure a lot of you guys got lasers for Christmas you know why I know because my DMs have been blowing up with Nick how do I put this laser together Nick what am I doing wrong Nick help so what I figured I'd do is put together a very simple video showing you how to get your xtool D1 Pro up and running and connected to light burn let's do this okay so first thing we're gonna do is we're going to come over to xtools website these guys couldn't have made this easier to take care of come in we're going to go to software you're going to choose the software for your machine we're using a Windows machine so we're going to choose windows we'll let that download and once that's downloaded we're going to go ahead and open it up okay once you're in XCS or X tool creative space you're going to go ahead and connect your device so I'm going to click here and it's going to say there's no devices available because my machine isn't on go ahead and turn it on right now refresh and there it is click it and now you're going to see your laser connected up in the upper right hand corner the next thing you want to do is come in here click this guy and check for updates and we just want to confirm that this is the most current firmware version I'm going to close this now my firmware is already upgraded but normally when you're doing this it's you're gonna have to upgrade it it's going to refer to a switch when it's prompting you through I'm going to show you where that switch is right now so there's no confusion okay to give you an idea of orientation this is your Wi-Fi antenna this is the Go Button mine has a cover on it and what you're looking for is this switch right here it's a tiny little black switch next to this white little box and when you're updating it's going to tell you to flip the switch to the left or the the left hand side of the machine so we're going to flip that now now you're going to proceed with your firmware update and after your firmware has been updated move the switch back to the right or back over towards the Go Button what that does is that keeps extraneous code from being transferred from your computer to your laser not having the switch oriented in the proper direction cause things like your laser stopping Midway through a car or the laser just kind of wandering off by its own or the laser losing a disability to travel on the wire x-axis very important to have that switch pushed to the right when you're facing machine all right let's take a quick tour of my laser because it does have some upgrades that you're not going to see with your actual D1 Pro I received the majority of these upgrades from Daniel at a live pixel Creations so some of the things he provides are a custom made fan covers this is a z-axis extender it allows me to move the laser head up and down further than the actual machine will allow so you can keep the legs on all the time speaking of the legs he also designed these spacers that hold your honeycomb up off your surface and Orient it to the legs this allows you to use other things like this ruler which allows you to keep things at a 90 degree angle and just because I get asked about this all the time this little guy right here is just just a button cover that I got from Amazon it covers the Go Button just so you don't accidentally bump it I will link that along with Daniel's website if you use this code on the screen you're good for 15 off anything regular price in this store actual creative space continues to grow and get better so if you guys want to hear about the newest updates to XCS let me know in the comments down below but for this video we are going to be installing light burn so once your firmware is updated you can close out of this next we go back to xtools website we are going to go to support and we're going to go down to 4d1 Pro that will take us to this page scroll down find this quick start guide for use light burn to operate X tool D1 Pro click on that and this is going to walk you through everything right here first thing we're going to do is download lightburn click on this you will pick your version here and download your version of light burn for your computer this is a fully functional 30-day trial once you decide to buy light burn because it's absolutely worth it and you go to the online store I get this question a lot which license software do you buy you're going to buy the G-Code license key your laser runs on G-Code you're gonna want this one now I'm going to close this because I already have light burn installed I'm going to open up light burn and while that's loading we're going to go back to xtools website we've completed the first part of step one the next thing you want to do is download this file right here a lot of people skip over this up this is very important to download so we're going to download that once it's downloaded I'm just going to pull it over and save it to my desktop so I know where it is and then we can close out of there and we're going to come over to light burn we'll go over these panels in just a second but what I want you to do right now is go to devices let me remove this because I already have it on there you're going to go to import you're going to find that file that you just downloaded you're gonna open it and it's going to install the X2 D1 Pro parameters in Lightroom okay so I don't know if you noticed but it did change the size of my laser bed here so a little bit on the landscape of light burn anything inside this square is considered your laser bat now light burn can be a little intimidating for people in the beginning so what I suggest doing is coming up here to the gears clicking on those and slipping this over into beginner mode what you'll notice is a lot of these Advanced icons will disappear it's just a little bit more helpful when you're first learning the software you're definitely going to want to turn that off later because you're going to have access to the rest of those so this tutorial turn them off it's just going to make your life easier now let's talk about this panel right here your first tab is cuts and layers so if I come over here and I decide that I want to draw a square it's going to put that on a layer okay these layers correspond to the layers down at the bottom of the screen and this is in line mode we use LINE mode when we want the laser to cut so to give you an idea if I click out of here you're going to see the solid line if I double click this that layer is set up to cut at a speed of 10 millimeters per second and the max power is 100 percent one pass don't worry about this stuff yet now if I also want to draw a circle I can do that and if I want to put it on a different layer I come down here I'm going to hit seven just because so you can see it and that layer is on a fill mode so what it the laser is going to do is it's going to engrave all of this space so if this so if this was inside here let me make it smaller so it fits so if I ran this right now if I hit start it would cut this line so cut the square and then it would fill in this entire circle okay we're going to come back to this in just a second your move panel here allows you to move the laser via the software so if I click that it's going to move 50 millimeters to the right 50 millimeters down and you get the idea don't worry about homing your machine right now we're not going to do that console this is where your G-Code is going to run you don't really need to worry about this unless you're throwing an error for some reason and then you may want to come in here just to look at the number to look up the error camera controls if you have a camera we didn't have a camera set up and don't worry about variable text for the time being okay now let's get our laser set up real quick before we get our laser lined up with where we want our start to be we want to make sure that it is focused so I'm going to pull it over the surface of your material we're going to kick the kickstand down and then we're going to adjust until we're touching our surface again I'm using my extended z-axis you guys would access this arm over here to release and move your laser up and down okay so once we're focused we're going to manually place the laser where we want it to start so right about there okay so we're gonna hop back into light burn I'm going to import an image I'm just going to use my logo and I'm just going to make this a little smaller so it doesn't take so long to engrave so we're gonna make that about 70 millimeters and then next what I like to do is grab this and this is currently in image mode what I'm going to do is I'm just going to right click and hit Trace image trace it and then I'm gonna pull the original out and we're gonna leave this using filmo this is just going to go a little faster and then I'm going to grab a circle I'm going to make that over here I'm going to make that 75 and then I'm going to put that on another path right so I'm gonna put it on we're gonna grab the circle bring it over here and it should snap to the center okay so now we have our cut and we have our engrave what we want to do now is set our engraving speed and power and our cut speed and power first we're gonna go ahead and select the pink so we're going to come up here double click and what we're going to do for the engrave is we want to do about and 80 millimeters per second engrave at 50 power don't worry about these labels right here you can change these whenever you want there there's some of them are preset in here already and if you're a stickler you can always change them when you go in here you could put this as you know cut three millimeter Walnut all right and for this our speed is going to be five millimeters per second and we're gonna go max power so we're gonna go 100 power okay so now these guys are set up should be good to go let's Mosey on down to the laser screen here okay so a couple of things one a lot of times this is a set at Absolute coordinates we want to change it to current position because what it's going to do is it's going to start from wherever you manually put the laser head right here is a job origin as you can see I have the upper left hand corner selected that means that is where it's going to start if I click off the you see this Green Dot that is where the laser is going to start from you have pause stop and start starts obvious gonna run the laser stop is going to completely shut down the job pause will stop the job but you can still restart it just keep those in mind but next what we want to do and you should always do this just to make sure that your laser is where you want it is to frame your piece so click frame and we're going to let it run everything looks good so we're going to go ahead and hit start all right guys and while we're letting the laser do its thing I just want to say thanks for sticking around until this point in the video if you like these beginner type videos let me know in the comments down below what you want to see next and give me a thumbs up speaking of Thumbs Up I always love to give an extra special thumbs up to all of my patrons these guys are the ones that keep the lights on in the shop if you want to join the cupcake Army at large or Laser Nation if you will check out my patreon page linked below and the coveted two thumbs up goes to all of my top tier patrons or boilermaker patrons Steven Mann Andy the Viking Todd Stewart Jason Ayers read means Tina Porter Derek Steele voltage and Frank the Tank Johnson Franklin from a five dollar Patron to a 30 Patron cheers my brother why is it so good if you want to help support the channel head on over to my patreon page check it out and join up if that's your thing if contributing monetarily is not your thing check out my Discord Channel links below as well a lot of good conversations happening over there we're uh we're talking about lasers kids we're talking about lasers and don't forget to subscribe to the channel now let's go check this thing out and there you have it your first laser engraved and cut piece with your xtool D1 Pro now if you want more lasery goodness like this right here watch this videoanybody ever ride the ball with a with a liquid death before don't show that your kids what's up cupcakes it is January and I'm pretty sure a lot of you guys got lasers for Christmas you know why I know because my DMs have been blowing up with Nick how do I put this laser together Nick what am I doing wrong Nick help so what I figured I'd do is put together a very simple video showing you how to get your xtool D1 Pro up and running and connected to light burn let's do this okay so first thing we're gonna do is we're going to come over to xtools website these guys couldn't have made this easier to take care of come in we're going to go to software you're going to choose the software for your machine we're using a Windows machine so we're going to choose windows we'll let that download and once that's downloaded we're going to go ahead and open it up okay once you're in XCS or X tool creative space you're going to go ahead and connect your device so I'm going to click here and it's going to say there's no devices available because my machine isn't on go ahead and turn it on right now refresh and there it is click it and now you're going to see your laser connected up in the upper right hand corner the next thing you want to do is come in here click this guy and check for updates and we just want to confirm that this is the most current firmware version I'm going to close this now my firmware is already upgraded but normally when you're doing this it's you're gonna have to upgrade it it's going to refer to a switch when it's prompting you through I'm going to show you where that switch is right now so there's no confusion okay to give you an idea of orientation this is your Wi-Fi antenna this is the Go Button mine has a cover on it and what you're looking for is this switch right here it's a tiny little black switch next to this white little box and when you're updating it's going to tell you to flip the switch to the left or the the left hand side of the machine so we're going to flip that now now you're going to proceed with your firmware update and after your firmware has been updated move the switch back to the right or back over towards the Go Button what that does is that keeps extraneous code from being transferred from your computer to your laser not having the switch oriented in the proper direction cause things like your laser stopping Midway through a car or the laser just kind of wandering off by its own or the laser losing a disability to travel on the wire x-axis very important to have that switch pushed to the right when you're facing machine all right let's take a quick tour of my laser because it does have some upgrades that you're not going to see with your actual D1 Pro I received the majority of these upgrades from Daniel at a live pixel Creations so some of the things he provides are a custom made fan covers this is a z-axis extender it allows me to move the laser head up and down further than the actual machine will allow so you can keep the legs on all the time speaking of the legs he also designed these spacers that hold your honeycomb up off your surface and Orient it to the legs this allows you to use other things like this ruler which allows you to keep things at a 90 degree angle and just because I get asked about this all the time this little guy right here is just just a button cover that I got from Amazon it covers the Go Button just so you don't accidentally bump it I will link that along with Daniel's website if you use this code on the screen you're good for 15 off anything regular price in this store actual creative space continues to grow and get better so if you guys want to hear about the newest updates to XCS let me know in the comments down below but for this video we are going to be installing light burn so once your firmware is updated you can close out of this next we go back to xtools website we are going to go to support and we're going to go down to 4d1 Pro that will take us to this page scroll down find this quick start guide for use light burn to operate X tool D1 Pro click on that and this is going to walk you through everything right here first thing we're going to do is download lightburn click on this you will pick your version here and download your version of light burn for your computer this is a fully functional 30-day trial once you decide to buy light burn because it's absolutely worth it and you go to the online store I get this question a lot which license software do you buy you're going to buy the G-Code license key your laser runs on G-Code you're gonna want this one now I'm going to close this because I already have light burn installed I'm going to open up light burn and while that's loading we're going to go back to xtools website we've completed the first part of step one the next thing you want to do is download this file right here a lot of people skip over this up this is very important to download so we're going to download that once it's downloaded I'm just going to pull it over and save it to my desktop so I know where it is and then we can close out of there and we're going to come over to light burn we'll go over these panels in just a second but what I want you to do right now is go to devices let me remove this because I already have it on there you're going to go to import you're going to find that file that you just downloaded you're gonna open it and it's going to install the X2 D1 Pro parameters in Lightroom okay so I don't know if you noticed but it did change the size of my laser bed here so a little bit on the landscape of light burn anything inside this square is considered your laser bat now light burn can be a little intimidating for people in the beginning so what I suggest doing is coming up here to the gears clicking on those and slipping this over into beginner mode what you'll notice is a lot of these Advanced icons will disappear it's just a little bit more helpful when you're first learning the software you're definitely going to want to turn that off later because you're going to have access to the rest of those so this tutorial turn them off it's just going to make your life easier now let's talk about this panel right here your first tab is cuts and layers so if I come over here and I decide that I want to draw a square it's going to put that on a layer okay these layers correspond to the layers down at the bottom of the screen and this is in line mode we use LINE mode when we want the laser to cut so to give you an idea if I click out of here you're going to see the solid line if I double click this that layer is set up to cut at a speed of 10 millimeters per second and the max power is 100 percent one pass don't worry about this stuff yet now if I also want to draw a circle I can do that and if I want to put it on a different layer I come down here I'm going to hit seven just because so you can see it and that layer is on a fill mode so what it the laser is going to do is it's going to engrave all of this space so if this so if this was inside here let me make it smaller so it fits so if I ran this right now if I hit start it would cut this line so cut the square and then it would fill in this entire circle okay we're going to come back to this in just a second your move panel here allows you to move the laser via the software so if I click that it's going to move 50 millimeters to the right 50 millimeters down and you get the idea don't worry about homing your machine right now we're not going to do that console this is where your G-Code is going to run you don't really need to worry about this unless you're throwing an error for some reason and then you may want to come in here just to look at the number to look up the error camera controls if you have a camera we didn't have a camera set up and don't worry about variable text for the time being okay now let's get our laser set up real quick before we get our laser lined up with where we want our start to be we want to make sure that it is focused so I'm going to pull it over the surface of your material we're going to kick the kickstand down and then we're going to adjust until we're touching our surface again I'm using my extended z-axis you guys would access this arm over here to release and move your laser up and down okay so once we're focused we're going to manually place the laser where we want it to start so right about there okay so we're gonna hop back into light burn I'm going to import an image I'm just going to use my logo and I'm just going to make this a little smaller so it doesn't take so long to engrave so we're gonna make that about 70 millimeters and then next what I like to do is grab this and this is currently in image mode what I'm going to do is I'm just going to right click and hit Trace image trace it and then I'm gonna pull the original out and we're gonna leave this using filmo this is just going to go a little faster and then I'm going to grab a circle I'm going to make that over here I'm going to make that 75 and then I'm going to put that on another path right so I'm gonna put it on we're gonna grab the circle bring it over here and it should snap to the center okay so now we have our cut and we have our engrave what we want to do now is set our engraving speed and power and our cut speed and power first we're gonna go ahead and select the pink so we're going to come up here double click and what we're going to do for the engrave is we want to do about and 80 millimeters per second engrave at 50 power don't worry about these labels right here you can change these whenever you want there there's some of them are preset in here already and if you're a stickler you can always change them when you go in here you could put this as you know cut three millimeter Walnut all right and for this our speed is going to be five millimeters per second and we're gonna go max power so we're gonna go 100 power okay so now these guys are set up should be good to go let's Mosey on down to the laser screen here okay so a couple of things one a lot of times this is a set at Absolute coordinates we want to change it to current position because what it's going to do is it's going to start from wherever you manually put the laser head right here is a job origin as you can see I have the upper left hand corner selected that means that is where it's going to start if I click off the you see this Green Dot that is where the laser is going to start from you have pause stop and start starts obvious gonna run the laser stop is going to completely shut down the job pause will stop the job but you can still restart it just keep those in mind but next what we want to do and you should always do this just to make sure that your laser is where you want it is to frame your piece so click frame and we're going to let it run everything looks good so we're going to go ahead and hit start all right guys and while we're letting the laser do its thing I just want to say thanks for sticking around until this point in the video if you like these beginner type videos let me know in the comments down below what you want to see next and give me a thumbs up speaking of Thumbs Up I always love to give an extra special thumbs up to all of my patrons these guys are the ones that keep the lights on in the shop if you want to join the cupcake Army at large or Laser Nation if you will check out my patreon page linked below and the coveted two thumbs up goes to all of my top tier patrons or boilermaker patrons Steven Mann Andy the Viking Todd Stewart Jason Ayers read means Tina Porter Derek Steele voltage and Frank the Tank Johnson Franklin from a five dollar Patron to a 30 Patron cheers my brother why is it so good if you want to help support the channel head on over to my patreon page check it out and join up if that's your thing if contributing monetarily is not your thing check out my Discord Channel links below as well a lot of good conversations happening over there we're uh we're talking about lasers kids we're talking about lasers and don't forget to subscribe to the channel now let's go check this thing out and there you have it your first laser engraved and cut piece with your xtool D1 Pro now if you want more lasery goodness like this right here watch this video\n"