Yes. I have a tablet external monitor (13") and it worked. Now I don’t need to make a box with LEDs and acrylic 
Thanks for the idea!
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Nice work but oddly, the thing That first hit me while reading your post was how easy it will be for me to make an inexpensive light table using LEDs and some acrylic. I made one several years ago for my daughter but it’s bulky, not portable and requires an outlet.
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Agreed. I built a 40" square light table years ago but left it at the old house when I moved. Anything that works is the best idea.
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I got mine on amazon from LitEnergy. [quote=“tbelhumer, post:22, topic:6366”]
LEDs and some acrylic
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Pretty much. Holding the power button on mine lets you dim the lights, but a simple on-off would be perfectly fine. It should be fairly easy to make your own.
The only issue I have had with this is that there are little 1/8" rubber feet at the four corners, and this creates a tiny dip at the center. Easy fix: some 1/8" material sitting on the desk under the thing. More intensive fix: a couple more 1/8" adhesive rubber feet.
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You guys are costing me money again! I just looked in my Amazon wish list to see what light box I had put in there a year or two ago. And there is currently a “lightning deal” to save $30 so I jumped.
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I HIGHLY recommend all Adobe products, but Adobe Draw app for your phone or iPad is amazing at transforming items/drawings into vector form with a picture. It will probably need to be cleaned up on the computer a bit but it is a huge jump start. Taking a picture of a silhouette like this would probably come out far exceeding your expectations and would help skip a few steps. Would love to hear if anyone tries it… @dan @staff I would love to see a category for Tips, Tricks and Recommendations or something like that. I have a ton of things to share that I have learned through doing and I bet other users do to that could warrant it’s own category so the advice isn’t simply lost in a project post. 
Thanks for considering it!
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You need to talk to @Jules. She (and a number of dedicated individuals) are working on a …I don’t know exactly what they’re calling it: Manual, Tip Book, Instruction Book… Anyway talk to her.
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Right @Jamie … even more reason to have a category… she can take directly from it. It would still be nice to have a specific place to just post Hey guys look what I figured out to do and not to do where we can ask each other questions or give advice if someone is having issues and needing help say with a specific material in real time.
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For somebody who doesn’t have Adobe CC but still wants to use their iPad, here’s another possibility, using two apps: Scanner Pro and imaengine. I took a scan of the colored die cut with Scanner Pro (highly recommended, I use it all the time as a copy machine and send print to wireless printer) and made sure to save as JPG in Black & White (pdf is another option). Opened it in imaengine and chose the Ink Drawing vectorizing option. After that you can save as JPG or PNG to Camera Roll, or SVG or PDF to Dropbox or Illustrator.
So, I uploaded the image as an SVG to Dropbox and pulled it down to Illustrator to see if it’s really a traced image. Here’s what it looks like selected in Illustrator:
Certainly looks promising!
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Yes! That’s wonderful and a really clean SVG to boot. I will be sure to check it out to recommend it for Inkscape users i know. If someone does download it let me know if you have to have CC… For some reason I don’t remember it making me sign in but I could be wrong. It’s the most realistic drawing app I’ve ever used… Would love any great free recommendations on your favorite drawing apps and software that’s free or close to free as well, guys!
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Yes, I was surprised by the quality of the tracing. Of course if you were hand tracing (or even autotracing in Illustrator) you wouldn’t put that many nodes in, but it’s a start. Would love to have a Glowforge to run it through.
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Adobe Draw is good, but for vectorizing images you might also consider Adobe Capture CC (still free!).
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I had asked for a specific Tutorials section a few months back. They are still looking into how they want to set it up. As soon as they do, we’ll start loading the information. (It’s doubling up the work to upload them now and have to move them again. And Glowforge is probably preparing a few of their own.)
Discourse is a chat forum - unfortunately it’s not set up optimally for training and tutorials. (There are some limitations to it that make it bulky.)
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The third post down in this thread has some links to a bunch of threads on free software. There may be some in that original thread as well. The fourth post has a great spreadsheet with tons of good stuff in it.
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You do not need CC to run the adobe apps on your device, but functionality is limited; I never found a way to export vector data from Capture without going through Illustrator. You can export a jpg of the vector and run an auto trace on that, but that’s an extra step.
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the clear advantage of mains power vs batteries, of course. gotta hustle where you may…
Look closer…
So you plug it into a 12V source and it outputs a fluctuating 110V - 220V?
Or does the pad create power so you can supply your house with 110?
Please feel free to add things to this post:
It isn’t a category; but if someone searches for “tips” it should come up.
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ahaha clearly i glanced over that part without paying much attention, it’s probably a funny translation artifact