How much longer is this job?
I’m aware that the team don’t like the idea of anything that means you are not next to your laser.
And the progress bar is not available on all controllers I believe. Ruida does not give this info.
However, a time started and a whole time of job would be very useful for planning my days work.
At the moment I do an Alt-P, note the start and job length manually when I remember.
Knowing how much time is left at a given moment of a new job is an intractable problem. Caching on controllers makes it untenable on most of my lasers, with the galvos being just as useless as the Ruida-controller CO2. Even on my gcode-driven diodes, however, time-progress is hard. A complex job with lots of fine detail (like trail maps) throws all the estimates off.
I’d love to have the current elapsed time in the Live Framing window on galvos. If you don’t have the laser control window showing when you start a job, you’re in a pickle due to the Galvo Live Framing bug(s).
Having a log (window?) of recent job elapsed times would be very helpful for at least having reference times for jobs you’re going to run more than once. Lightburn currently shows the completed job elapsed time at the bottom of the main window, but if you don’t catch it before doing anything that updates that status field, you have no way of getting it back. Having it at least persist in a “status log” window until you close LightBurn would preclude that frustration.
As for persistence of timing data, I personally throw the job time(s) into the “Show Notes” option and set it to show on file open. I also put the setup details, like what screw hole coordinates to mount a fixture to or what lens to use, but the time for each job (e.g. Front: 3:43, Back: 0:57) is really nice to keep for those annual big award engraving jobs, for example.
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I rarely looked at the Status Bar, so I did a quick test using Fill on a small rectangle.
- Preview said 1:04.
- Status bar said 1:12
I thought “nice”, until I noticed it said “Streaming”. This implies an understated total time if the controller can buffer a bunch of instructions. But it did indicated a difference, so I will watch it when doing images where the actual time is typically 2x-3x the Preview time. Line only work seems to be very close to the Preview window display.
Thank you @ClayJar for a new Lightburn tool.
To clarify, I have no problem with how the timer works. It’s incredibly accurate for me. I’ve seen it off by single digit seconds at most.
My complaint is that it takes me forever to get my eyes to locate it when checking in. It’s literally the most important information during a burn, while also literally the smallest panel on the screen. I’d love to be able to make much larger during runs. My screenshot was meant to point out how incredibly small and buried it is on a large screen.
Why not un-dock the laser window and make the window itself lager? During the engrave process, you don’t need the work space window on top of the stack. Make the whole monitor the window for the laser tab?
i.e.
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I actually spent somewhere between 3 and 5 seconds seeing if could move the time field. Did not occur to me to do as you suggest. I will try that. Thank you.
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Short term fix while your request is reviewed.
I have been using this undocked approach for the past few days. It’s definitely better for me. The timer is still WAY TOO SMALL in my humble opinion. I’d love to have a large, digital countdown timer that dominates my LB work session during job runs.
Also the size of the window isn’t just immaterial, but inversely helpful.
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