So I’m tasked with making a table on our laser here at work and our software won’t hatch and won’t do pretty much anything but etch holes and lines. That’s what we get for spending 300k+ I guess. So I brought my flat pattern in to lightburn. It seems to look ok in draw mode but then I try to export it and all I get is the perimeter and the holes. Bear in mind that I need to etched all these round holes on the one layer and then the fill pattern I need to etch as well then cutout the part. So if you look at ss1. I need to etch the green circles and cut the black lines. Then If you look at ss2 before cutting I actually need to reverse etch all the perf area outside of the holes. I can only think of trying to get LB to create me a dxf file that has the hatching converted to lines. If that makes sense. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I don’t think I have a full grasp of what the complication is and what you’re trying to accomplish but this is the general sense I get:
You have a laser run by proprietary software that has limited functionality
Because of the above, you’re trying to design this table in LightBurn
In LightBurn you want to modify the design to make-up for the limitation of the proprietary software, specifically it’s inability to fill a shape. I assume this is what you mean by hatch.
Correct me if I’m wrong but based on your description of the software you’re good to go with what needs to be done for screenshot 1. If not, can you further elaborate what’s missing there.
If I’m understanding this correctly you want to basically pre-create lines where the area is meant to be filled, essentially the entirely of the blue layer.
If so, try this:
select entirety of blue layer. At this point you may want to group these shapes for ease of selection later.
Edit->Convert to cut (debug).
This will leave you with your original blue layer as well as a newly converted set of very dense lines. These will be based on the laser path that would be planned in LightBurn and are affected by the scan angle and line interval from the Cut settings.
Select all converted blue layer
File->Export->save to DXF
Note that this will leave you with a LOT of shapes and may slow things down considerably but see if that works for you.
Question, what’s the software that you’re running on the other machine?
So this advice would be a Godsend if there were a way that LB didn’t under or overshoot the lines of the hatching once it converts it to tooling. Is there a way to control that by any chance?
