EtchCraft — AI-Powered Laser Engraving E-Commerce

The Problem

Laser engraving requires clean line art — precise outlines that a fiber laser can trace onto metal. Most customers have photos, not line art. The manual conversion process (tracing in vector software) takes 15-30 minutes per image and requires design skills. That's a bottleneck that limits how many orders you can process.

The Approach

Build a self-service platform where customers upload a photo, AI converts it to laser-ready line art, they pick their options, and order. The architecture splits into three parts — like a restaurant with a front of house, a kitchen, and a delivery system.

The storefront (Next.js on a VPS) handles browsing, ordering, and payment. The AI kitchen (FastAPI on GPU hardware) does the heavy image processing. The fulfillment pipeline (n8n workflows) routes paid orders to the laser workstation.

The critical design decision: the GPU server runs on a homelab RTX 3090 and connects to the storefront through a Tailscale VPN tunnel. The GPU hardware is never exposed to the public internet — it has no public IP at all.

The Tech

The storefront follows an "Industrial Luxury" design aesthetic: dark background (#0c0c0e) like a CNC machine shop at night, red accent (#e74c3c) matching a fiber laser beam, noise texture overlay simulating brushed aluminum grain, and laser crosshair corners on the upload zone.

The AI service runs ControlNet for image-to-line-art conversion and vtracer for raster-to-SVG vectorization. The resulting SVG files include proper layers for different laser power settings, ready for LightBurn import.

The Outcome

Customers can go from photo to order in under 5 minutes. The AI pipeline handles the artistic conversion that previously required manual work, and the Tailscale architecture means the expensive GPU hardware stays safe on the local network.