Hi everyone,
given the increasing availability of high-powered diode lasers entering the market, there is one common issue these machine have: their laser spot size is no longer square, because they combine multiple (lower power) laser beams into one non-square (more or less oval) laser beam.
The issue one runs into is thus, that the kerf (the amount of material that is removed in the cutting process) is different in x and y directions. That means the width of the cut is different depending on direction. A square of 1.000 inches might be 1.000 inches in one direction and 1.010 inches in the other direction (for more complex shapes like circles it varies depending on x and y position). A mere kerf offset cannot account for that.
There are mitigatory steps one can take, like rotating a design by 45 degrees, but this doesn’t help for all shapes (it works for squares and rectangles, but doesn’t work for circles).
The solution that really works is adjusting the design to compensate for the oval shape.
There is one project on github by roTechnic that has achieved exactly that:
The project is accompanied by a nice and not too long YouTube video that explains both the problem and the solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UIqhCjMC0U
I have used the script and it really works, but unfortunately only for single objects in an SVG file. This is not representative of most designs I am trying to cut that often have tens to hundreds of objects in one SVG.
So it would be awesome if LightBurn developers could look into integrating the solution provided in the github repository into LightBurn.
I’m sure it is not a trivial task, but give the increase in availability of affordable high-power diode lasers there sure will be a lot more potential users of that feature in the coming years and this feature would definitely set LightBurn apart from LaserGRBL.
The following topics also dealt with non-square laser dots:
And then there is this feature request: