Adjusting artwork orientation / scale on workpiece - feature request?

[cobo (Colby Boles)]

This is probably more a feature request than a question, but I’m wondering if there’s a good way to do transformations (x,y offset, rotation, maybe scale) of the artwork at the point at which you are live-framing and about to mark with the laser.

What I’m trying to do is line up artwork in the galvo / laser coordinate system with that of the workpiece. I understand that most people will probably just hand-orient the workpiece, but unfortunately for us, we have a relatively complex tooling jig that rotates and is bolted to the laser table chassis. Our part position can’t be adjusted, but it is well within the galvo/lens FOV.

It should be an easy thing to be able to use the keyboard to shift, rotate, and possibly scale the live framing interactively. As it stands right now, you have to do these transformations in the artwork document and then start a live framing session again, leave the framing dialog, make more adjustments, return to framing to see your changes on the workpiece, etc. It’s a very poor iterative process with no live feedback.

These transform adjustments could be saved in the LightBurn file, but wouldn’t affect the actual position of the artwork in the document. To me, these should always stay separated. My artwork has remained the same - I’m just positioning it for a specific marking situation.

It might be better to actually have another file that holds this transform and other things, such as the rotary stage settings related to aspects of the physical hardware that are not the laser itself. The reason is that I may have multiple files of artwork that I may want to use with this same rotary stage jig, each with the same alignment settings. Currently, I would have to go into to each piece of artwork, offset, rotate, and scale it by the exact same amounts as artwork it was aligned with.

I should also mention that we have four lasers like this, each of which should be able to use the same LightBurn artwork file, but each with different alignment settings (they are not identical, and have different mounting holes and laser lens positions)

[Albroswift (Al Fernandez)]

You can position and scale while “Live Framing” with rotary just like on the flat, using page up, down for scale, and arrow keys to move. Shift and CTRL to make the jumps smaller.

This works in “Live Framing” modifying position, scale:

Once you are in rotary window> rotary framing it won’t work, probably because the software is displaying slices.

This doesn’t work modifying position and or scale in Rotary Marking>Rotary Framing:

@cobo

I’m just positioning it for a specific marking situation.

As far as I know, LB does not allow for changing the fiber laser machine coordinates on galvos like you can in g-code. For instance with a 300x300 lens, bottom left is always -150, -150. If you could change that, it would be easy to have different configurations for different objects on the rotary so maybe that could be the feature request.

Another easy option would be placing and locking boxes using T1 and T2 layers for your various projects and save as templates.

Another way out there option is what I do, but I have the rotary setting on an X-Y table so I can position it where I want and could save the coordinates for future if need be.

[cobo (Colby Boles)]

Thanks - is this only a Lighburn 2.0 thing? If so, maybe that is why I missed it as we are using Linux and LB 1.7.xxx. I will check on the machine later if this works on LB 1.7.

[Albroswift (Al Fernandez)]

Don’t think it’s 2.0 thing.

[cobo (Colby Boles)]

Also, to be clear, I am using the “other” type of rotary stage, namely it has 8 part holders on it and advances to the next part once the current part’s marking is complete. We mark thousands of serialized parts in a session with a CSV file and the rotary operates continuously with the operator adding new parts and removing marked ones from the stage as it goes along.

[Albroswift (Al Fernandez)]

Controls should work the same. I do it all the time with my rotary table and XY table.