LaserFoundry 0.1.0

LaserFoundry 0.1.0

The first release of LaserFoundry: an open-source, clean-room laser engraver and cutter application in pure Rust. Lay out
vector and raster artwork, give each colour layer its own speed, power, passes and fill settings, preview the toolpath, and
stream GRBL G-code to your machine, or to the built-in simulator when nothing is plugged in.

This is an early release. The whole pipeline works end to end and is well tested, but everything that talks to a machine
has been tested only against the built-in simulator, not on real hardware. Read
docs/hardware-bringup.md before your first job: it covers safety, a laser-off motion test and
first marks on scrap material. LaserFoundry is independent of, and unaffiliated with, other laser software vendors.

Download

Platform	File	Notes
Windows (x64)	laserfoundry-windows-x64.zip	Signed with Azure Trusted Signing
macOS (Apple silicon)	laserfoundry-macos-arm64.zip	Signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarized and stapled
Linux (x64)	laserfoundry-linux-x64.tar.gz	Not signed; needs the usual X11 or Wayland libraries

Each archive holds the desktop app and laserfoundry-cli. There is no build for Intel Macs yet. You can also try the design,
preview and G-code tools in your browser at https://stitchwright.github.io/laserfoundry/ (Web Serial machine control needs a
Chromium-based browser).

What you can do

• Bring work in: SVG (shapes, groups, transforms, units, pictures and text), DXF (lines, polylines with bulges, circles,
  arcs; loose segments are joined into closed shapes), PNG and other images, and the native .laserfoundry project file.
• Draw and edit: rectangle, ellipse, line, polygon and star tools, a pen tool and node editing, text in an original
  single-line stroke font or filled outlines from a font file you choose, text on a path, vertical and mixed-direction text.
• Combine and arrange: boolean union, subtract, intersect and XOR; offset (grow, shrink, kerf-style); grid and circular
  arrays; align and distribute; snapping, rulers, alignment cues and groups.
• Work with pictures: brightness, contrast, gamma, negative, crop and sharpen, several dither modes, and tracing to vectors.
• Set up cuts: 16 layers with Line, Fill or Fill + Line mode, speed and power, passes, fill interval and angle, kerf
  offset, tabs, lead-ins, overscan, perforation, cross-hatch fill, per-shape cut priority and material test grids, plus presets
  and project templates.
• Preview before you cut: a timeline preview with acceleration-aware time estimates, and "cut selected shapes only".
• Run the machine: a persistent GRBL connection with live status, jog, home, frame, set and go to origin, job origin modes
  with a 9-point anchor, pause and resume, run from a line, automatic reconnect, resume after a power cut, Z axis and rotary
  support, and a safety check that refuses to start a job while the controller reports an alarm or hold.
• Stay safe: G-code generation refuses out-of-bed coordinates and non-finite numbers instead of clamping them, comments
  cannot inject commands, and cancelling a job soft-resets the controller so the laser turns off.
• Never lose work: autosave with recovery after a crash and prompts before anything discards unsaved changes.
• Headless and agents: laserfoundry-cli converts files to G-code, runs JSON command scripts and serves every command as
  Model Context Protocol tools.
• AI assistance (optional): Design from Prompt, Redraw Image and Ask About Lasering, in the desktop and browser apps. They
  use a Foundry account and credits, and nothing is sent until you opt in.
• Accessible and translated: screen-reader support, an editable keyboard-shortcut map, themes, a tablet mode and translated
  menus, messages and errors.

Known limits

• Not run on real hardware. Every machine feature is verified against the simulator and GRBL's public documentation only.
  Please report what you find; the app can save a machine report (Laser → Save machine report) with nothing private in it.
• Other G-code dialects: the Marlin-laser and Smoothieware dialects were written from their public documentation and are
  untested on hardware. There is no Ruida support.
• Signing: the signed Windows and macOS builds have not yet been checked on a fresh machine, so the SmartScreen and
  Gatekeeper first-run experience is unconfirmed.
• AI: a signed-in request against the live account service has not been tried end to end, and the prompts have not been
  tuned from real use.
• Scope: this covers a fraction of what established laser software does. docs/target-app-parity.md
  is an honest self-assessment and docs/gaps.md is the ranked work list.

Under the hood

Pure Rust with no unsafe code and no panics in shipped paths. Importers and protocol code have hostile-input tests and fuzz
harnesses. A security review (clean dependency advisories and two independent code reviews) found and fixed several issues, each with a regression test. The code is MIT or Apache-2.0 licensed, and nothing was copied from other
laser software.

Full history: ROADMAP.md.