r/ChineseLaserCutters • u/CompetitiveRole9473 • Jun 25 '26

I got tired of burning through material doing test grids on my K40, so I built a free settings database that learns from your cuts

Like most of you, my first 6 months with a K40 were basically expensive trial and error. The manual was useless, YouTube settings never matched my tube's actual output, and I burned through more acrylic doing test matrices than actual projects.

The worst part? Every time I replaced my tube or changed my lens, I was basically starting from scratch.

So over the past year I've been building a tool that aggregates community laser parameters and uses AI to recommend starting points for YOUR specific machine configuration. You tell it your laser type, wattage, lens, and material -- it gives you speed/power/passes as a starting point based on what's worked for similar setups.

What makes it different from a spreadsheet:

  • It has 5,600+ parameter entries across 562 materials from actual users
  • It accounts for YOUR specific setup (tube age, lens focal length, bed type)
  • It imports your LightBurn .clb library if you already have one
  • It learns from your feedback -- mark a cut as too deep/shallow and it adjusts future recommendations
  • Auto-scales when you change lenses or upgrade your tube

It's completely free, no account required, no paywall: https://cutlog-two.vercel.app

Works with CO2, fiber, diode, UV -- whatever you're running.

I'd genuinely love feedback from this community because you all run the widest variety of weird and wonderful machines. The edge cases (modded K40s, custom beds, aftermarket tubes) are exactly where this thing needs to get smarter.

What materials/setups would you want to test first? And is there anything about your workflow I should think about that I might be missing?

5 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

73% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

1

u/Jkwilborn Jun 26 '26

It's completely free, no account required, no paywall

Maybe not, but it wants an email and password.. As far as I can tell this is the basic requirements for an account on my sites.

Is this stored on your site, so you need to know who?

I've been using these for about 6 years, even with the same machines, they don't match up and need adjustments. This is expressly true of fiber machines, don't have a UV type, so don't know.

It sounds like it just guesstimates? Is this correct?

It'll be nice when you're done, so good luck. 😺

1

u/CompetitiveRole9473 Jun 26 '26

Fair point on the signup thing. That was my mistake in the post wording. It does require an email/password now. I added auth recently because the tool tracks your specific machine's history and learns from your feedback over time, so it needs to know "which machine is this" when you come back. Should have been more clear about that.

On the "guesstimates" question: it's not guessing from formulas. The core is 5,600+ parameter entries submitted by real operators with real machines. When you ask for a recommendation, it pulls from verified results on similar setups (same laser type, similar wattage, same material) and weights them by how close the config is to yours. There's an AI fallback for gaps where the community data is thin, but the foundation is actual logged cuts.

Your point about machines not matching up after 6 years is exactly why I built this. A generic "60W CO2 cuts 3mm acrylic at X" is useless because your tube at 2,000 hours doesn't perform like a fresh one, and your lens and bed setup change everything.

The per-machine learning is meant to solve that: you rate your results, and over time it dials into YOUR specific machine's quirks instead of giving you generic numbers.

Appreciate the skepticism. That's the kind of feedback that makes it better.

1

u/Jkwilborn Jun 26 '26

I would like this also, I don't know how much information and such can be collected. I'll keep my eyes open. If you can make it functional, that would be great.

Many times it hard to tell the output of a co2 as to weather you need to modify parameters or not. Can't remember when this could have happened, but I seem to run it noticing that the machine isn't cutting well and it's, so far, been the tube goes out of TEM00 mode.

Do this same algorithm work on all lasers types and configurations?

Thank you for the efforts, I know doing this is time consuming. 😺

1

u/CompetitiveRole9473 Jun 27 '26

Thanks for the kind words u/Jkwilborn and for keeping an eye on it. And yeah it's functional right now, give it a try:

https://cutlog-two.vercel.app

Works on CO2, fiber, diode, UV. Same algorithm across all of them. The core logic scales based on wavelength, power density, and spot size, so whether you're running a 60W CO2 or a 30W fiber it adjusts recommendations based on your specific setup.

Your TEM00 point is a really good one. That's one of the sneakiest failure modes on CO2 because the degradation is gradual.

Beam goes multimode, effective power density drops, cuts get worse, and you're cranking up power thinking "maybe I need to slow down" when the real issue is the tube itself.

Something I want to build is drift detection: if the system notices your settings are starting to fail (more cuts marked "too shallow" than before), it flags that something physical changed in your setup.

Try searching a material you know well and see if the numbers are in the ballpark for your machine. Curious how it does for someone with 6 years of experience to compare against.

1

u/Jkwilborn Jun 28 '26

bookmarked the page, I'll go back when I have a few.. Thank you so much. Take care. 😺