From the installer to your first marked piece. Read it once, in order: it takes about ten minutes and it saves the afternoon most people lose on their first day.
Before anything else — this is a Class 4 laser. The 1064 nm beam is invisible and it damages your eyes instantly and permanently, including by reflection off the metal you are marking. Everyone in the room wears laser glasses rated for 1064 nm, every time, no exceptions. Never leave a running job unattended. Metal marking produces fume: use extraction. Your enclosure and your glasses are what protect you — never a setting in any software, including ours.
The USB driver, said up front. To talk to the board directly, HagoLaser needs the generic WinUSB driver on the laser's USB device, and the installer includes the standard tool to switch it. While that driver is installed, EzCad3 will not work. The two are mutually exclusive. Going back to EzCad3 means uninstalling the device in Windows Device Manager (ticking "delete the driver software") and reconnecting the cable. If you depend on EzCad3 for production today, try this on a machine where you can afford the switch.
Run the installer and open HagoLaser. The first time, a setup wizard appears with four cards. It is not decoration: it is what adapts the program to your machine.
Press Start and it applies everything. Nothing here is destructive: it reads your EzCad3 files, it does not modify them.
This is the step everybody misses. The wizard installs the palette, but Inkscape does not select it on its own.
The first three swatches are now labelled with what they do. From here on you are not picking colors, you are picking operations.
Why it matters: if you draw with Inkscape's own default blue instead of the palette blue, it is a different blue, and nothing gets engraved. When a first design comes out empty, this is almost always the reason.
The color of each line decides what the laser does with it. There are no layers to configure and no export step: the drawing is the job.
Inner before outer, and that is deliberate. Holes and interior details are cut while the piece is still held by the surrounding sheet. The outline that frees the piece is cut last. Do it the other way round and the part moves halfway through the job.
These three are the defaults and they work out of the box, but they are not a rule: in the Colors tab you can assign any color to any operation, so a workshop with its own color code keeps it and just declares what each color means, once.
A useful trick: a color that is present in the drawing but not assigned to any operation is projected by the red aiming light without being marked. Draw a circle in an unused color and use it to line the piece up in the jig, knowing the laser will not touch it.
The loop: save in Inkscape → press Mark in HagoLaser. The program re-reads the file from disk every time it marks, and keeps it loaded between sessions. If what comes out is the previous design, you simply did not save.
In the parameters library you pick a material and a thickness — "Silver 0.8 mm", for example — and every color loads its own recipe: power, speed, frequency and number of passes. One choice sets up the whole job.
The wizard already imported your EzCad3 pens as recipes, so what you had calibrated is there. You can edit any of them, duplicate one to start a new material from something that already works, and add your own.
Never calibrate on a real piece. Any new material, thickness or supplier gets proved on scrap first. Change one thing at a time. For cutting, find the pass count that just goes through and add a small margin — going far beyond widens the cut, heats the piece and distorts thin sections.
The laser only works properly at its focal point, and the window is narrow: a couple of millimetres out and a cut that should work does not cut at all. It is the single most common cause of "my laser got weaker".
HagoLaser already knows your machine's real focus, because the wizard read it. What you tell it is where the surface of your material is:
You can enable or disable individual operations for a single job — engrave now and cut later, for instance — without touching the recipe.
The piece that comes off the machine is not the piece you sell. Cutting and deep engraving leave a dark, oxidised edge; polishing afterwards is a normal part of the job, not a sign that something went wrong.
Design with that in mind: detail that is too shallow gets softened or removed by the polishing itself, which is one more reason to engrave with real depth rather than leaving a surface mark.
Check three things, in this order: the laser is powered on, no other program is using it (EzCad3 must be closed), and the board has the compatible USB driver — the wizard's fourth card tells you. A powered-off machine and a wrong driver look identical from the outside.
Open Windows Device Manager, find the laser device, uninstall it ticking "delete the driver software", and reconnect the USB cable so Windows reinstalls the original driver. The two drivers cannot coexist.
Almost always the colors. Check that you selected the HagoLaser palette in Inkscape (section 3) and that you drew with its swatches — Inkscape's own default blue is a different blue and matches nothing. Also check that the operation is enabled for this job.
You did not save in Inkscape. The program reads the file from disk at the moment you mark, so an unsaved change simply is not there.
Work the pass count, not the power: turning the power up usually just widens the cut and heats the piece. Before that, check the height — an out-of-focus cut looks exactly like a weak laser. And if a recipe that used to cut suddenly only draws a line, check the wobble diameter: too small a wobble marks beautifully and never opens the cut.
Focus, nine times out of ten. Thicker material, a jig that moved, a piece that is not sitting flat. Measure the sheet and check the height before you touch any parameter.
The laser mark is wider than your drawn line, so in fine artwork it closes the small white gaps that are the actual detail. Use the laser-width compensation in the operation settings, which shrinks the marked area by half a spot so the mark lands the right size. More compensation gives a finer, cleaner result; too much starts breaking up the fill.
The free licence lasts one year and renews from inside the program, with the same button you used the first time. It is tied to the machine, not to your email.
Write to info@hagolaser.com and tell us what machine you have and what you were doing. HagoLaser is in beta and a good part of what it does today exists because someone took the time to report a problem.