The laser at Fellesverkstedet has a cutting area of 914mm by 610 mm so make sure you stay within those boundaries with your material & drawing. Preferably also leave some space between the edges of your material and your drawing. This way you have a bit of slack with positioning your drawing and material. 2 mm is usually safe.
There are 2 ways to use the laser: 1 is to have the laser follow your lines and thus cutting into or through the material (for this you need a vector drawing). The other is to have the laser engrave the drawing. By engraving, the laser will rapidly move from left to right while going down line by line, similar to how a normal ink printer works. (For this you can use both a vector drawing or raster file like jpeg, bitmap, etc)
The video below shows both processes: First it engraves the image by quickly moving back and forward and afterwards it cuts through the material by slowly following the a vector drawing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPML_O3L6s4
Engraving obviously takes way more time than cutting so this is something to be considered when preparing you design.
The laser cutter is setup as a printer in the computer, which means we can prepare our files in either Illustrator or Rhino and then "print" the geometry to the laser-cutter. However, it is also possible to prepare your file in other software and then import them into Illustrator as long as they are either vector file or jpeg (in case you'd like to engrave).
For parts that you would like to cut out, you will need a vector drawing. There are ways to automatically convert bitmap images into vector files but it will greatly depend on the contrast of the image and might require some manual tweaking of the settings: Search on Google for "Image Trace" + the name of the software you work with (Illustrator or Inkscape for example)
Give parts to be cut a red color and make sure the RGB value is set correctly to Red = 255, Green = 0, Blue = 0. Also make sure the stroke width is set to 0.01 (pt or mm).
Engraving can be done with both a vector file or a bitmap. For vector files you will need to make an infill which is black and the RGB Value is set to Red = 0, Green = 0, Blue = 0.