Editable post processor?

LightBurn Software Questions
1

I want to cut metal with LightBurn!!

Thank you so much for all the hard work and effort you have put into this project!!

How do I get the air assist to turn on while laser is on and off when laser is off? Editable post processor?

In SheetCam I can edit the post processor and can add M08 to the output of the pen down function. This turns the air assist on when the laser turns on. On the pen up function I just add a M09 to the function output.
This turns the air assist off when the laser shuts off to move to next pierce position.

On pen down it turns air assist back on and starts the laser. If anyone knows what I am talking About chime in Incase I am confusing anyone.

I have a solenoid wired into air assist pin on grbl arduino uno.

I need this function so I don’t waste o2 while machine is moving to next piercing point. With compressed air (air pump) it doesn’t really matter I suppose because the air is pretty much free/very cheap.

Sheetcam will do this for me but I have to run through UGS. I don’t like UGS very much but if I have to use it I will be very sad…I love LightBurn.

2

LightBurn already emits M8 for air assist on and M9 for off, but I believe that it is per layer, not per move. There is not an editable post processor, and won’t likely be for quite a while - the internals of the GCode generator are already quite complicated because I flip between relative and absolute moves for efficiency, track floating point precision error (differently for mm and inches) and try not to emit anything that doesn’t need to be.

An editable post processor would make that quite a lot harder, and wouldn’t do what you want anyway - I’m already generating the codes you want, just not exactly when you want them.

1 Like