In this video, we're going to get you all the way from "I don't know what a laser cutter is" to getting your very first thing cut on an X-Tool P3. We're going to start with some important safety, then look at how to create the design file you need for the laser cutter, then we'll process it with the X-Tool Studio software, and finally, we'll cut it out. Before we begin, this video may see usage in a public space such as a library or makerspace. If you are a member of the public using this machine, always double-check with staff in case there's any unique procedures or steps or anything like that that might be specific to your space. And of course, if you're watching this with your own P3 at home, do whatever you like. It's your machine.

First things first, safety. This machine is designed to be safe, and if you're using the machine properly and respecting the power it's capable of, you are not going to have any worries using this at all. Now that said, let's talk about some of the things this machine is capable of if you're not operating it correctly. The X-Tool P3 is a CO2 laser. It creates a super high power beam of invisible light that is bounced around with some well-aligned mirrors so that the laser enters the cutting head here and shoots down right into your material. The laser is focused down to about the width of a human hair. This means that it's super concentrated and it creates so much heat that it just vaporizes away material. With this, it makes it really easy to cut plastics and woods. Metal, a lot less so because it just reflects right off.

The machine can also drop the power of the laser a little to instead burn the surface of the material. And this means it'll engrave the surface of your material instead of cutting it. So first things first, the laser is a danger in 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 here because machines like the P3 are really well built. And that top lid is a special kind of glass that keeps all the invisible lasers inside the machine. Additionally, the machine is designed to not work if the lid is opened. As long as you are using the machine correctly, it's safe. It's got the same laser class safety rating as a DVD or CD player. Those devices also have lasers in them that can cause eye damage as well, but the design of them means that it's safe to use as long as you don't take them apart or modify them.

The second thing, this is a controlled burning. It's uncommon, but not impossible to start a fire in this machine. You must watch the machine at all times while it is cutting in case a fire starts. If you leave the room, you must pause the job. Even at MIT, there are cases of students quickly going out and getting a coffee, and when they come back, half the lab is on fire. These fires in a laser cutter machine start really, really small, and if you catch them early, they are very easy to put out. And finally, only cut materials on an approved list. The real danger is that not all plastics are safe to laser cut. Things like vinyl and PVC have chlorine in them, and when you vaporize these plastics, you create chlorine gas, that chemical weapon they used in the trenches in World War I. Most of the time, you'll be cutting acrylics and woods, which are fine to cut, but just always know what you're actually cutting. Don't throw a random unknown material on there, and if it's anything funky or outside of the norm, ask someone who knows what's up.

Again, with all this safety stuff, we don't want to scare you out of using the machine. You just have to respect these things, and you're going to have a safe experience. With that, we can get going with the first step of cutting, which is to get our shape or design file that we want to cut. And here, we have a few options. If you're using a design you found online, great, you're already done here. You can just download it and open it up in X-Tool Studio, which is the software that we'll be using with the P3. If you instead want to design something yourself, you have a few options. The first option is to draw it in X-Tool Studio itself. X-Tool Studio has some basic drawing tools to make simple designs in it, and it's fairly straightforward. We will be doing a quick tutorial of this in the next step, by the way.

If you're looking to maybe design something a little more complex, you might want to use an external software. The two biggest are Adobe Illustrator, which you have to pay for, and Inkscape, which is free. Both of them have their quirks, but both can do the same job just fine. And we're not going to do a tutorial on how to use these, as there are a million tutorials on the web already on how to use them. If you're getting your design file externally, you'll need to save the file as either a DXF or SVG. These are just some of the file formats that X-Tool Studio will import. And just because it can be a bit confusing the first time you encounter it, these are vector files. Most of the time, an image is made up of pixels, and as you zoom in, it gets pixelated. We call this a raster image. Vectors, on the other hand, which is what our laser cutter needs, are images or designs made up of lines defined with math, as in there's an equation telling how the lines should move. This means that you can zoom in forever and ever and ever and never see a pixel at all. You don't need to be an expert on this, it's just a bit of context that helps. We're dealing with vectors instead of raster images.

Alrighty, let's get going with X-Tool Studio. Go ahead and download it from the X-Tool site and follow the installation instructions. There's nothing really fancy going on here. Now chances are, if you're cutting in a public space, there will be a certain computer connected to the laser cutter that you'll need to use to send your job to the P3. However, we can install Xtool Studio on our own computer right now, design it and set everything up, and then just put our file on a USB or something and open it up on the computer, connect it to the P3 and cut it out.

So first things first, let's create a new project. Here we will be greeted with our workspace. On the left, we have our design and drawing related tools, and on the right, we'll have our cutting and machine related tools. To start, it might be a wise idea to choose the machine that we'll be cutting on, as this will set our maximum canvas size. To do so, we're going to go ahead and select a device, and if you've got your machine already connected, you'll be able to see it here. If not, we can just select the P3 from the device library. Now let's go ahead and draw with some of the tools on the left here. These may change as time progresses, but the core tools will likely remain. With these tools, we can add some text, we can create basic shapes, we can add more complicated shapes and designs, we can use more advanced tools, these might be really helpful for creating specific things, and if you're looking for some inspiration, you can check out the community projects that people have already made.

Now, if you already have your DXF or SVG that you created externally, you can just go ahead and hit import, find the file, and import it and move on to the next step to get it cut out. We, however, are going to draw something from scratch. I want to make some of these. We'll probably need some close-ups of this. It's a counter for a nerdy card game that I play, and I'm going to need a few dozen of them. But let's start by drawing one. I think as a first step, we'll make just a really simple one. I'm going to go ahead and select the circle tool, and then I'm going to click and drag to make the circle like so. Now, when I select the circle, you'll see this little toolbar appear at the top. Here, you can set the position, size, and alignment of your object, as well as maybe a few other goodies on the side here. Now, I want this counter to be 15 millimeters wide, so I'm going to go ahead and set 15 millimeters there. Let's zoom in by pressing control and using the scroll wheel. But I also want it to be 15 millimeters tall so that it's nice and perfectly round. To do this, I will need to unlock the aspect ratio with this button here. And now, if I go ahead and change it, I can do it. If I didn't unlock it and I tried to change this number, it'll change that number as well. This aspect lock ensures that your shape can't be squished or squeezed in one direction.

Also, when you're designing, it's always handy to have a ruler or set of calipers on hand so you can kind of visualize how big things are going to be. So I can see 15 millimeters here and go, yeah, that's big enough. Alrighty, let's go ahead and use the text tool to add some text to it. And I'm just going to need mine to say plus one, plus one on here. And then I'm going to go ahead and drag this to about the size that I want. When we select our text up in the toolbar, you're going to see our text related options. And I might just go here and change the font while I'm at it. I kind of like that one. And I'm just going to go ahead and resize that for our coin again. And that is looking pretty good. If I was happy with this and wanted to finalize it, I could go ahead and start assigning the cuts and engravings to this. So if I select the circle because I want it to cut out this circle, I can go ahead and select cut. And if I select the text, I can go ahead and select engrave. And as you can see, it fills it in. And from here, we can move on to the next step. But I think this looks a little too simple for what we can do with this machine. So we're going to go ahead and make something a bit nicer and explore some of the other important tools.

I want to try and copy a set of counters that I already have. And I actually have a photo of it. So we can go ahead and actually import that photo. And I'm going to bring it in like so. Oh, that is really, really massive. Far out. That's big. Now importing this image isn't going to magically let us, you know, cut this exact looking thing and all the detail and everything on it. We're just going to be using it as a drawing reference. So first of all, I'm going to go ahead and make it a little bit smaller. As you can see, it's sitting above everything. So I want to go ahead and go to layers, click on it in there, and then drag it to the bottom. And as you can see, it's going to be under everything else. While I'm here, I'm going to drag this image to be about 15 millimeters as well, which is how wide I'm going to want my counters to be. Now we can just go ahead and select our circle, hit the delete key, select our text, and hit the delete key as well. Now what I'm really after is drawing that kind of outline pointing rectangle shape of my counter. And there's a few different ways that we can get this. One of the most common ways that you'll create shapes is with the pen tool. This is really our bread and butter of vectors. You can not only click to add points, but if you click and hold, you can also create curvy lines like so. And then you can adjust them by selecting the dots. As always, there's important tools up in the toolbar that you might want to check out. This is going to let you, you know, change how the curves move and interact with each other.

I'm going to go ahead and delete that thing that we just drew because the other way we can do this is that we can draw a basic shape and then modify it. Here I'm going to go ahead and create a rectangle and I'm just going to drag it from point to point to point like so. And then if I double click the rectangle, I can go into this editing mode. I can hover over a line and then click and drag to create a new point like so. I'm just going to go ahead and create a bottom one as well. And with that we got the exact same shape. Now, I don't really need this image anymore, but I might keep it around in case I need it. So I'm going to go ahead down to layers again, and I'm just going to hide it in our layers like so. Now let's add some detail to it. One of my favorite tools is the offset tool. This is going to take the shape that you have and then either make it smaller or bigger by a certain amount. In this case, I'm going to make the shape about half a millimeter smaller on the inside like so. And then I'm going to take this new line and repeat that once more. I can then select these two shapes by clicking one and then pressing and holding shift and clicking the other. And if I go up here, I can make these a compound vector. This is going to go ahead and merge the two of these lines into one shape, creating sort of a, if we drag it around, like a square pointing arrow donut kind of deal. Why did we do this? Well, now we can select our new shape and then hit engrave and we engrave the area between these two lines. I'm intending for this outer line here to be a cut. So it's going to cut, have a bit of clear acrylic and then have this laser engraved, you know, kind of rim around it.

If we unhide our reference image, we can also see that there's a line going down the middle and I'm just going to hide that back again. Let's go ahead and draw that just simply with the rectangle tool. And I'm just going to draw that in and then go ahead and size it correctly. Now I'm going to go ahead and select the rectangle and then press and hold shift to select our other shape. And if we go up to our combination menu here, we can hit unite. This is going to take the area of both of those shapes and turn it into one new shape. The tools under this combine tab here are very powerful and you should experiment with them. I'm then going to go ahead and finish our part by putting in some text exactly like we did before, just fast forward all of this editor. Now I am quite happy with this shape. So to finalize it, I'm going to select everything and then go ahead and click group here. This is not turning it into one compound vector. This is instead just putting it all together as one unit. So now if I click this, we can, you know, drag and scale and, you know, treat it as one object. Now I need to cut a few dozen of these out. So instead of copy and pasting it, you know, multiple times over and lining them all up, I could go ahead and select it, go to our application or advanced tools and then select this grid array, which is going to let me, you know, duplicate it a certain amount of times, however many I can fit on my sheet of material. This might be a bit smarter to do once in the final step and you can kind of see your material and line it all up. But for now we have our shape. We created something pretty cool given how simple tools we have access to. So now I'm just going to go ahead and save it, save it locally. You can put it to the cloud if you want, but I'm going to save it locally so I can put it on a USB stick. And now I'm going to go ahead and move to the computer that we have connected to our P3 and open my file up on there.

Wow, look at that. Here's some pre-recorded footage we prepared earlier of us getting this exact shape cut out on our computer on the P3. So first things first, on my cutting computer, I went ahead and opened up my project file. Then in the top right, I ensured that the P3 was connected and ready. If it isn't, you can hit this little symbol here and connect to it under my devices. Then open the lid of your machine and put down the material that you're going to be cutting. I'm just using an off cut of three millimeter acrylic here. It doesn't really matter where you put it as long as it's within the cutting area. Then with the lid open, move away and give the camera in the top of the lid a moment to scan your cutting area. When the light turns green, you can close the lid. This is one of the fantastic things about the P3, by the way, because you should now see that scan in X-Tool Studio. And this is going to be a massive help in lining up our design on our cutting piece. Now the machine will be moving and going around and automatically setting the focus of the laser. But if in the top right here, you see this auto process completed, you are good to go.

Now this image is great and we can go ahead and happily line up our piece on it. But if you really want some precision, you might want to use the close up camera. In your workspace, select an area and the second camera on the cutting head of the machine will automatically move to that position and take another photo. And this is going to give you a more high resolution image with more accuracy. This close up image, by the way, is usually pretty darn accurate and you can line things up down to easily half a millimeter of accuracy, which we're going to be doing here to try and really use all of this scrap piece of off cut. Now we need to tell X-Tool Studio what material we are actually going to be using. This can be done by clicking on the material section here and then choosing one of the presets. With that, we can now go ahead and hit the process button. This is going to give us an estimated job time of how long it's actually going to take to cut, as well as a path preview, which is going to show us how the machine is going to cut and engrave our part. We did, however, forget something here. We hid the image in the layers, but it will still try and engrave this image out. To fix this, we need to head back into layers and delete it or under the cutting settings of the image, we can disable it from the output. And with that, we can go ahead and process again and hit the start button to send the job to our P3. And on the P3 itself, you'll need to go ahead and press the input dial to start the job as well. Remember, you must keep an eye on the machine while it's cutting. If for any reason you want to pause it, just press the button on the P3 again, and obviously pressing it will resume your cut.

During the cut, you can see roughly how much time is left in X-Tool Studio, as well as get this cool viewing, you know, monitor camera inside of the machine. It's really funky. Also ensure that you have the air extractors or air filters running during the cut. This is mainly in case you have any that manually need to be turned on. If you're using any of the X-Tool ecosystem, it's probably already paired and automatically running. Once your cut's done, let the machine sit for a good 10 to 20 seconds before opening up the lid. This is just to ensure all of the bad fumes get extracted out. Then go ahead and remove your parts and ensure that you remove any scraps or anything that might have fallen into the machine. You want to keep your machine as clean as possible. And that is our first part cut. Now, good thing we only did one because the engraving job is pretty subpar. The cut is fine, but the engraving is struggling on a part this small. To fix this, we'll simply change the lines per centimeter from 200 to 300. This is kind of the resolution of the engraving that we're going to be doing. And then I want to just kind of maybe make it a tiny bit bigger. So I'm going to change the width from 15 to 18 millimeters. And at this point, I was pretty confident that it was going to come out well. So I laid a few dozen of them out on my scrap bit of material. And you know, you can just copy and paste them as many times as you want, or you can use the grid tool if you like. When your parts are laid out, just hit process again, you know, exactly the same. It looks good on the preview, hit start and then hit start on the machine as well. And hey, look at that. 15 minutes later, it's been more like three days since we filmed that footage. We have our counters ready to go. Increasing that resolution and making them just a tad bit bigger really helped us out here. And just to drill it into you, with my parts done, I'll go ahead and check that I didn't leave any junk in the bottom of the machine. And then I'll go ahead and close the lid and switch off the machine and air extraction and filtration if needed. And that is how you go from nothing to getting a part cut on the X-Tool P3. If you have any questions about this process, maybe ask a staff member first if available. If not, feel free to head on over to our community forums. We're all makers over there and we're happy to help. Until next time though, happy making.