All Gcode sender software for CNCs I’ve seen animates the toolpath on screen while a job is running. Yes you can see what’s going on at the machine but it’s nice to see graphically which parts are yet to go.
Can’t see an option to turn this on in LB. Is it there,? If not it would be a great feature.
As I’ve heard it explained, Lightburn will never do this because it encourages people to walk away from the machine and just depend on animation which won’t tell them if machine hit something and is now burning a hole thru to China.
LightBurn will send either an entire program to the laser controller or will send enough to fill a buffer then send further chunks of data as the buffer empties. There’s no feedback from the controller back to LightBurn to say how far it has progressed through the program, just a confirmation to indicate that it has finished. LightBurn could make an educated guess based on what it knows about rapid and feed rates etc. but it would soon get out of sync with reality.
Consequently I can’t see this ever being implemented.
Thanks for the responses.
Interestingly the same reasonings apply to CNC machining but every Gcode sender does a 3D animation. You still need to keep an eye on the machine in case of collisions and a gcode buffer applies. Sync issues are to some extent controllable by reducing buffer size and most Gcode operations are small moves anyway. If for example a long straight line is sent an approximation is fine.
3D animation would still be a great feature. It could be off by default and you’d have to manually enable it.
LB is such an amazing package with incredible features and attention to detail this seems to be a big gaping hole when moving from CNC.
Original GRBL controllers with tiny ATmega 328 chips could buffer only a few ASCII G-Code commands at a time, so the senders can show a reasonable representation of where the tool was a few commands ago. That’s particularly easy for CNC tools with relatively slow cutting speeds: the tool can’t get too far ahead of the command buffer.
IIUC, the origin of LightBurn was an improvement over RDWorks for machines with Ruida controllers, which have enough memory to swallow most binary RD programs whole and give no indication of progress during execution. Which means there’s no way to track what’s going on as the controller chews through the program.
Modern GRBL controllers have far more memory and swallow bigger chunks of G-Code than Arduino chips, so they resemble Ruida controllers: after they get the whole program, they’re off and running, again with no way to tell what they’re doing.
A “real time” plot seems easy in principle, but the hardware makes it surprisingly difficult.
In a practical sense I don’t see visually tracking in cnc and tracking a laser is any different. My Arduino in cnc mode can do it easily. So I’m sure it can be done and would be nice.
Being part programmer, machinist, and electronics technician, my guess is that GCode senders do not stream the data. They send one line, show it on the screen, send the next line, show that on the screen, and so on.
Lightburn simulates the same in the Preview mode, with the advantage of multiple speeds. But it sends many lines of code to the controller before the laser ever moves.