MoonCutter - a GUI for the K3 Laser Engraver

Binaries available https://github.com/postincrement/MoonCutter/releases

Features

• Cross platform thanks to ElectronJS
• Engrave bitmaps and text

To-Do

• Add a fan button to the engrave tab
• Make rotation use centre of object
• Save and load projects and settings

Thanks!

This program would not have been possible without the work of Marcel Ochsendorf who reverse engineered the protocol.

His project has more information:

https://github.com/RBEGamer/K3_LASER_ENGRAVER_PROTOCOL

Running from source

This is a normal ElectronJS program so the usual instructions apply.

Installation

1. Make sure you have Node.js installed
2. Clone this repository
3. Install dependencies:

npm install

Running the Application

To start the application, run:

npm start

Debugging

There are several ways to debug the application:

1. Main Process Debugging:

npm run debug        # Start with debugger attached
npm run debug-brk    # Start with debugger attached and break on first line

2. To debug the main process:

   • Start the app with npm run debug
   • Open Chrome and navigate to chrome://inspect
   • Click on "Open dedicated DevTools for Node"

3. To debug the renderer process:

   • Start the app normally
   • Press Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Option+I (macOS) to open DevTools
   • Or use the debug mode which opens DevTools automatically

Building Native Applications

MoonCutter can be packaged as a native application for macOS and Windows using electron-builder.

Prerequisites

• Node.js and npm installed
• For Windows builds on macOS/Linux: Wine installed

Building for macOS

npm run package:mac

This creates a .dmg installer in the dist folder.

Building for Windows

npm run package:win

This creates a Windows installer in the dist folder.

If you are building the Windows installer on MacOS, and the installed program crashes with an error about binding.node not being a valid Win32 program, run the following command rebuild the installer:

rm -rf node_modules/\@serialport/bindings-cpp/build/Release/bindings.node

Building for Both Platforms

npm run package

This builds installers for all configured platforms.

Creating icons

For MacOS:

• ensure the icons are in images/icon.iconset as .png files
• run the command in the images directory

iconutil -c icns icon.iconset

For Windows:

• the icon is in images/icon.ico