Hi All,
I have setup a few different cameras in lightburn for some friends ,the latest is a16mp and after many hits and misses it is setup ok and works very very well . Get one if you dont have one !
What I don’t understand is the process itself as it makes no logical sense even though I can achieve good accuracy after a few prods and twists.
Perhaps Im asking a question that is un necessary but In my head it never makes real sense .I cant be the only one who can do it but doesn’t know why and how with conflicting results and advise like it does not need to be mounted to work ??
I make changes with no effect, then come back to where I started and the same thing now works ,there is something dynamic happening under the hood . I will sleep better if i can be allowed to know what the steps mean and why they fail at times?
People thank me for getting it right but I have no idea what the heck I am doing other than being persistent.
Oh and the camera on the gantry . I could not find much on that.
Camera setup and use can be a fussy process, but there’s nothing dynamic happening under the hood - after your initial lens calibration and overlay alignment, the numbers will never change unless you overwrite them with a new calibration or alignment.
What can and sometimes does change is the relative position of your camera to your workspace - if the camera is loose on its mounting location, mounted to a lid with some play in its hinges, or not always returning to the exact same position as it was when you first ran the alignment, that can cause misalignment. If you have a tabletop engraver and it moves, that can cause misalignment.
If you switch to a thicker or thinner material and do not have an adjustable height bed, that can cause a misalignment (the height between camera and workspace will have effectively changed).
The calibration process with the dot pattern can be tricky, but that is generally a one time only process. As long as you achieve a good result with that once, you should never have to do it again, regardless of the position of the camera. This may be related to the conflicting advise you’ve seen - the calibration process does not need to be done with the camera mounted, only the alignment step doesn’t.
Support for head-mounted/gantry mounted cameras is relatively new, still in a beta-ish phase, and not yet documented. In time we’ll have resources available on that subject.
For now, here are some resources on the overhead camera alignment process:
