For the past few months, my nights have looked a little different. Once the kids are asleep and my day job wraps up, I’ve been heads-down building a passion project for the laser engraving and physical fabrication community.
If you’ve ever designed files for laser marking, CO2 cutting, or CNC engraving, you know how disjointed the design process is. You end up juggling four or five different tools: one for Art generation, another for vectorizing, another for dithering photos, and others for specialized tasks like box or tumbler templates. By the time you’ve manually exported and imported files between multiple apps, you’ve lost your creative flow—and probably wasted a few test burns in the process.
To solve this, I built Reticle Red.
It’s a unified, web-based design workspace built from the ground up for laser operators. Instead of hopping between disjointed subscriptions, it brings everything into one cohesive console:
The Fabricator: AI-driven design generation and neural inpainting designed to style specific physical surfaces (like tool handles or custom templates).
The Coin Designer: A dedicated engine for creating 3D medallions and challenge coins.
The Image Lab: High-fidelity bitmap-to-SVG vectorization and dithering presets optimized for clean wood and metal engraving.
The Command Center: Over 30 utility tools, including box generators, puzzle makers, rotary tumbler templates, and a shared database of speed/power parameters.
I wanted to build a workspace where you can take a concept all the way to a clean, burn-ready vector or bitmap in seconds, without leaving the browser.
Between my family and my day job, this has been a labor of love built entirely on late nights and caffeine. If you work with lasers, CNC, or physical product design, I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think. New accounts include 12 free credits to test out the AI engines.
Link: https://reticle-red.com
#laserengraving #lasercutting #fabrication #vectorgraphics #makers #solodeveloper
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