Everything between the drawing and the cut.
Import an SVG or a photograph, arrange it on the bed, set power and speed, then stream the job to a Grbl 1.1 diode laser over USB. Nothing to install and nothing tied to one computer: the browser talks to the controller itself.
A diode laser is a class 4 laser.
Wear goggles rated for your wavelength. Extract the fumes. Never leave a running job unattended, and never cut PVC or vinyl, which gives off chlorine gas and eats the machine along with your lungs. No software can make any of that safe for you, and this one does not pretend otherwise.
The whole path, without leaving the tab.
Not a viewer with a send button. The geometry, the ordering, the G-code and the serial protocol are all here, and all tested.
Import
SVG, with each stroke colour becoming a layer. Whatever the importer cannot handle is listed in a banner instead of quietly dropped, and you can re-read the file at a different scale without losing the rest of your work.
Draw and write
Rectangles, ellipses, regular polygons, lines. A text tool that keeps the text editable: choose a face from a file, from the ones installed on your computer, or from Google Fonts, and rewrite the words a week later.
Kerf and booleans
One beam-width figure grows the material by half of it, so a 20 mm part comes out at 20 and a 4 mm hole comes out at 4. Union, difference, intersection and exclusion for everything the drawing did not already say.
Fill, tabs, ordering
Scanline and concentric fills with overscan, so the head is already at speed when it crosses an edge. Tabs that keep a part in its sheet. Holes cut before the profile that would drop them.
Fit the sheet
Bin packing lays parts out on the bed, around anything you have locked in place, turning a piece a quarter turn only when it earns the space.
Photographs
Six dithering modes, from a plain threshold to Floyd–Steinberg, Jarvis, Stucki and Atkinson. The dots are drawn on the bed at the resolution they will burn at, before a sheet is spent finding out.
Time
Planned over the chain the head actually travels, with acceleration and the axis
limits read off your controller. Progress and remaining time are measured in
seconds, because G0 X400 and a 0.15 mm curve segment are one line
each.
Frame it, and the frame is the truth.
Before a job starts, the head traces its outline at 1% power so you can see exactly where it lands on the material. That outline is measured from the toolpath and not from the drawing, so the lead-ins and the raster overscan are inside it: with the beam off the head still goes there, and a part resting against the edge of the bed would otherwise find out the hard way.
The order is decided once, and the estimate, the preview and the programme that runs are three passes over that same decision. Nothing gets reordered on its way to the machine, so what you watched in the preview is what the controller receives.
A photograph is a different order of job.
A hundred millimetres square at 254 dpi is a million cells and half a million lines of G-code. Nothing here ever holds the whole programme: lines are produced as the controller's buffer frees up, so the browser stays responsive and the machine never waits.
The scan grid is anchored to the machine and not to the picture, so two images placed edge to edge share the same rows and show no seam. Rotate one and the grid is sampled through the rotation rather than swept diagonally, because a belt engraves cleanly along an axis and in no other direction.
While it is running, the buttons follow the machine.
Pause, resume and stop are live, and so is the controller's own state: if it enters a
hold by itself, from a door switch or a ! typed into the console, the
interface moves with it. Feed, power and rapid overrides are adjustable mid-job, one
step at a time, waiting for the machine to confirm each one rather than firing a burst
it would silently merge.
Ctrl/Cmd + . is an emergency stop from anywhere in the app, including
while a field has focus, and it sends a soft reset whether or not a job is running,
because a jog is movement too.
No laser to hand? Press Simulator instead of Connect. A faithful Grbl
1.1 emulator answers the protocol: settings dump, status reports, an ok
per line, and a receive buffer that complains if the streamer ever overruns it. The
entire pipeline works with the machine unplugged.
What you need.
Driving the machine uses the Web Serial API, so it wants a desktop browser that
implements it and an https page. Designing and exporting a G-code file
works anywhere.
| Browser | Drives a machine | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome, Edge, Opera | yes | Desktop, version 89 and up. Everything works. |
| Firefox 151+ | with permission | Desktop. Press Connect and follow what Firefox asks for. |
| Safari | no | No Web Serial, and Apple has said it will not add it. Design and export still work. |
| Phones, tablets | no | This is a bench tool for a desktop. |
About the beta.
Dotpath is in open beta and free while it lasts. It asks for an account so your machine profiles and material presets follow you between computers, and so there is a way to reach you when something that affects a running job changes.
Your projects stay on your computer. A .dotpath file is
saved to your disk or to your own browser and never to us, and it carries its machine
profile inside it, so it still cuts the same programme a year from now on a different
machine with a different library. What travels with the account is the small stuff:
preferences, profiles, presets.
Something wrong, or something missing? There is a report button inside the app, and it says exactly what it is about to send before it sends it. Or write to support@dotpath.app.
Open a tab, plug in the laser.
Enter the betaNo download. No licence key. Works offline once it has loaded.