xTool P3 First Time Cutting Quick Start Guide

In this guide, we’re going to get you all the way from "I don’t know what a laser cutter is" to holding your very first custom creation cut on the xTool P3. We’re going to start with some important safety tips, look at how to create the design file you need, process it with the xTool software, and finally fire up the machine to cut it out.

Before we begin, this guide is designed to be helpful for everyone, whether you own the machine or are using it in a public space. If you are using this P3 in a library, school, or makerspace, always double-check with the staff first! They might have unique procedures or specific steps you need to follow.

Let's get into it!

First things first: safety. This machine is designed to be incredibly safe, and if you respect the power it's capable of, you will have a worry-free experience. But to understand the safety, we first need to look at what this machine is actually doing if you aren't operating it properly.

The xTool P3 is a CO2 laser. It creates a super high-power beam of invisible light that gets bounced around by some well-aligned mirrors, enters the cutting head, and shoots right down into your material. This laser is focused down to the width of a human hair. This super-concentrated beam creates so much heat that it literally vapourises material away—usually woods or plastics.

The machine can also drop the power of the laser to simply burn the surface of the material, engraving it instead of cutting all the way through.

Because of this mechanism, there are three main safety areas you need to be aware of:

1. The Laser Itself: The laser is a danger in and of itself. It does not discriminate between skin and wood, and it can instantly blind you if it reflects off something and hits your eyes. Now, we don’t mean to scare you! Machines like the P3 are really well built. The top lid is made of a special glass that keeps those invisible laser beams inside the machine. Additionally, there are sensors that prevent the laser from running if the lid is open. As long as you use the machine correctly, it’s about as safe as using a DVD or CD player. Those devices also have lasers that can cause permanent eye damage, but the design makes them safe for everyday use - provided you don't take them apart or modify them.
2. Fire Safety: Cutting with a laser is essentially "controlled burning." It is uncommon, but not impossible, for a fire to start. You must watch the machine at all times while it is cutting. If you need to leave the room, pause the job. There are horror stories (even from places like MIT) of people leaving for a quick coffee and coming back to find half the lab on fire. These fires usually start really small, and if you are watching, they are very easy to catch and put out early.
3. Material Safety: Finally, only cut materials on an approved list. The real danger here is that not all plastics are safe to cut. Materials like Vinyl and PVC contain chlorine. When you vapourise these plastics, you create chlorine gas (the chemical weapon used in the trenches in WWI). Most of the time, you will be cutting acrylics and woods, which are fine. But you must always know what you are cutting. Don't throw a random unknown material in there, and if it's funky or outside the norm, ask someone who knows what's up.

Again, we aren't telling you this to scare you out of using the machine. You just have to respect these rules, and you are going to have a safe, fun experience. With that out of the way, let's get going!

The first step of cutting is actually getting the shape or design file we want to cut. Before we look at where to find these, we need to quickly talk about file formats.

For a laser cutter like the P3, you will generally need your design saved as either a DXF or an SVG. These are what we call Vector files.

It can be a bit confusing the first time you encounter them, but here is the gist: Most images (like JPEGs or PNGs) are Raster images. They are made up of pixels; if you zoom in, they get blocky and pixelated. Vectors, on the other hand, are images or designs made up of lines defined by math. This means you can zoom in forever, and they will never get pixelated; they stay perfectly sharp. You don’t need to be an expert on the math behind it, but it's important context to help you understand why we can't just throw a standard photo into the machine and expect it to cut a line around it. We will be taking these lines defined with math, and telling the machine, which shapes we want to cut, and which shapes we want to fill with an engraving.

So, where do you get these vector files? You have a few options:

• Download one online: If you found a cool design on a repository site, great! You can usually just download the SVG or DXF and open it straight up in xTool Studio. xTool has their own design file repository called Atomm - definitely worth checking out!
• Draw it in xTool Studio: The software for the machine actually has some basic drawing tools built-in. It is very feasible to make simple designs right there in the app. We will actually be doing a quick tutorial on this in the next section!
• Use External Software: If you are looking to design something a little more complex, you might want to use dedicated design software. The two biggest players here are Adobe Illustrator (which you have to pay for) and Inkscape (which is free). Both have their quirks, but both can do the job just fine. We aren't going to do a tutorial on these specific programs here, as there are about a million tutorials on the web for them already.

If you are designing externally, just ensure you export or save your file as a DXF or SVG format.

Once you have your file, you can install xTool Studio, create a new project, then hit the import button to select your file and move on to the cutting section. You might want to use the toolbar at the top to ensure your file is the correct size before cutting as well.

Go ahead and download xTool Studio and follow the installation instructions. Now, chances are there will be a specific computer connected to the laser cutter that you will eventually need to use to send your job to the P3. However, we can install it on our own computer now, design and set everything up comfortably, and then just put our file on a USB stick to open up on the machine's computer later.

So first things first, let's create a New Project. You will be greeted with our workspace. On the left, we have our design and drawing-related tools, and on the right, we will have our cutting and machine-related settings.

To start, it is a wise idea to choose the machine we will be cutting on, as this will set our maximum canvas size correctly. To do so, hit Connect Device (or the device name in the top right) and select the P3.

We are going to draw something from scratch to get a feel for the tools. I want to make some counters for a nerdy card game I play, and I'm going to need a few dozen of them. Let's start by making a really simple one - just a circle with some text in it.

Start by selecting the circle tool from the shapes menu on the left-hand side of Studio, then click and drag on the canvas to draw the circle (or oval if you stretch it out). When you select the circle, a toolbar will appear at the top of Studio. This toolbar will contain several important settings for your shape, such as width, height, position, and other tool-specific options (like font settings when using the text tool).

I want my counter to be 15mm wide, so I will set it to 15mm in width. I also want to set it to 15mm in height as well so it is perfectly round. To do this, I will need to unlock the aspect ration with the button between the width and height in this toolbar. This aspect ratio lock ensures that you can't skew your object to be wider or thinner. Try and adjust the size of the shape with it locked vs unlocked to learn what it does.

Some quick tips: you can zoom in by holding shift and using the scroll wheel on a mouse, and when designing, it is always handy to have a ruler or set of callipers nearby. This will allow you to get a visual representation in person of how big something really is.

Now let's add some text. Select the text tool, click on the canvas, and type in whatever you want. We are just going to type in "+1/+1" for our counter. Then in the top toolbar box, we will set the font we want, as well as the size and text options we wish as well. All your font spacing and related settings will be up there.

That is looking pretty good. If I was happy with this, I could start assigning the "Cuts" and "Engraves." This is how we tell the laser what to do with each line:

• Select the outer circle, go to the settings panel on the right, and set the processing type to Cut.
• Select the text, and set the processing type to Engrave. The text will fill in, showing that the laser will burn the surface there.

We could move on to the cutting step right now, but I think this looks a little too simple. Let's scrap this and make something a bit nicer to explore some of the more powerful tools xTool has to offer.

We could have stopped there, but let's be honest—that circle was a bit boring. Instead, I want to copy a specific design from a set of counters I already own. To do this, I’m going to use a photo of them as a reference. In xTool Studio, hit Import, then select the image.

I am leaving our round counter here for now so that we can scale the counter in the image to be about the width of our circle, which is the size we want. Now, this won't let us magically cut out this exact shape immediately; we are just using it as a drawing guide.

When you import the image, it will likely place it ontop of all your drawings, but we want it in the background! To do so, open up the layers panel in the very bottom left, and drag the image to the bottom. If you ever have trouble selecting a certain line or feature, this layers panel will help.

Once the reference image is scaled correctly, I will then delete all the lines associated with the round counter.

We need to recreate that "pointing" shape of the counter. There happens to be two great ways to do this:

• Method A: The Pen Tool. This is kind of our bread and butter. The Pen tool allows you to click to place points, and it draws lines between them. If you just click, you get straight lines. If you click and hold, you can create curvy lines, which you can then adjust by grabbing the handles.
• Method B: Shape Editing. Select a Rectangle and draw it over the main body of the shape. If you double-click the rectangle, you'll enter "Edit Mode." You can now hover over a line and click to add a new point, then drag that point to create the point of the arrow.

Once you have your outline, you can go into the Layers panel and hide the reference photo (click the little eye icon)—we don't need it anymore. Just make sure to double-check your size and ensure its exactly 15mm wide.

Now let’s make it look professional. One of my absolute favourite tools is the Offset tool.

Select your shape and click Offset. This will create a new line that is bigger or smaller than your original.

I’m going to set it to 0.5mm to create a line just inside the border.
Select that new inner line, and hit Offset again to make another one inside that.

Why did we do this? Well, now we can hold down Shift and select both of those two inner lines. Then in the top toolbar, we can select Create Compound Vector. This merges those two lines into one "object" think of it like a squarish donut.

With this, you can now select this shape and hit engrave. This is going to create a nice thin engraved brim around the edge of our counter and make it look a bit more professional.

I also want a line to be engraved down the middle of this shape. To do this, we are going to draw a shape, then merge it with the shape we just created. So go ahead and:

• Draw a thin rectangle down the centre. I'm just going to make mine 0.5mm wide.
• Then select the rectangle and the donut shift while holding shift.
• Then in the top toolbar, open up the Combine menu, and hit Unite.

This will combine the two areas of those shapes into one new shape. These tools under the Combine menu are very powerful and worth experimenting with.

Finally, let's put our text back in ("+1/+1"). We will just create two text boxes and align them to look visually correct. Then we will just repeat the process and ensure we select each line and assign it as a cut or engrave.

I am quite happy with this! To keep things tidy, click and drag to select everything and hit Group in the top toolbar. This treats the whole design as one unit so you don't accidentally drag the text off the badge.

Go ahead and Save your project (locally), and let's head over to the laser cutter!

Wow, look at that! We are finally ready to turn these digital lines into a physical object.

Go ahead and move to the computer connected to the P3 (or plug your laptop in) and open up your project file. First things first, ensure that the P3 is connected and ready in the top right corner. If it isn’t, hit the little device symbol to connect to it.

Open the lid of your machine and pop in your material. I am using an acrylic offcut here. It doesn’t really matter where you place it, as long as it sits in the slatted cutting area.

With the lid open, step back and give the camera in the lid a moment to scan the bed. When the light near the handle of the lid turns green, you can close it, and you should now see an image of the cutting area in your xTool Studio!

In the top right under the device, look for the message "Auto-process complete". This means that the machine has measured the height of your material and finished automatically setting the focus of the laser.

With this preview of our cutting area in Studio, we can really line up our parts and use every bit of surface possible on our material. But there is a way to get an even more accurate image so we can really line up our parts with precision.

Under the auto process, select the Close shot button, and click on your cutting area where you want more detail. This will move the cutting head in the machine to that location and take an HD photo with the second camera on the head.

The result is a pretty darn accurate image of where your machine will cut, you can often line up something with less than half a millimetre of accuracy.

Now we need to tell xTool Studio what material we are actually cutting. Click the Material menu in the settings panel on the right and choose your preset (e.g., "3mm Clear Acrylic"). This will let our P3 know what laser power and speed settings are required for the best cut on your material.

With that, we are now ready to cut! Hit process in the bottom right, and a new window should pop up. This will provide you with a preview of whats being cut, as well as a path preview to see what steps the P3 will take to cut your machine.

This is worth checking because in our instance, we can see an issue. The reference image we import is going to attempted to be engraved! To prevent this, hit the back button in the top left, go to the layers menu, and delete it. Then hit process again, and it should disappear!

Once you are happy with the cut, you can hit Start. This will send the job to the machine, and you will need to press the button on the P3 to tell it to start cutting. 

REMINDER: Keep an eye on your cut. If you leave the room, pause the cut by pressing the button. Resume it by pressing the same button again.

Once the machine is finished, give it a good 10 to 20 seconds to let the extractor fans suck out any residual fumes, then you can open the lid. After, you can grab your cut, and ensure you remove any offcuts or scrap bits that might have fallen down into the machine.

The image on the right shows the cut we just did, and it is pretty subpar. This is why its a good idea to do a single test cut first before committing to a larger cutting job.

To fix this, we can go back to our workspace, then under then under the engrave option, we can set the Lines Per Centimeter from 200 to 300. This will increase the resolution of our engrave.

I also want to make this part a tad bigger as well. Selecting it, then changing the width from 15 to 18 mm will scale the whole part as we have grouped it together.

I was also quite confident that we had our settings dialled in, so I was ready to commit to cutting a lot of these. We could copy and paste our shape multiple times, but a wiser way to do this might be with the Grid array tool that can be found under Applications on the left menu.

With the exact same steps as before, we can process and cut out our parts. Even though we are cutting 35 times more parts than last time, this won't take 35 times longer, and you will find that it is, on average, quicker to cut many parts out at once.

Regardless, we went ahead and cut out our part. These two little changes greatly helped our engraving quality, with the image on the right showing a comparison.

And that is how you go from "I don't know what this machine is" to holding a finished part in your hand!

If you have any questions about this process, ask a staff member if you are in a makerspace. If not, feel free to comment on our community forum post linked below. We are all makers over there and happy to help out.

Until next time, happy making!