What would be the quickest most efficient way to run this image? I have a Co2 150w Laguna Smartshop laser. It will be run on 1/2" birch wood, 7" diameter. Before I got Lightburn, I’d run everything with RDworks. In RD works, I used 475 speed 25/65 power, scan mode, interval .00394 (which is default and I’ve never changed it). With the cut and scan, it would take approximately 18-20 minutes.
In lightburn, I’ve been playing around with tracing the image and even think a cut line could work, (but I have double lines from the trace.) I tried a fill on the traced image at 465 speed 30 power line interval 1 dpi 254, fill shapes individually, I checked flood fill.
The total time is showing 14 minutes. I want to make sure I’m dialing in on all of the settings available for the most efficient run time. The image is a PNG
This is my image and trace:
Hi, I think 'fill all shapes at once is your best bet, flood fill is ok but i believe it’s more for shapes that are far apart.
I would try a piece of waste material and up the speed to around 1000/sec see how that looks and tweak as needed, if it looks good, go higher.
Do not use ‘Flood Fill’, as this is intended for slow speed scanning, avoids long travel over empty space. Your art does not have these open spaces, so this may actually take more time to complete.
Thank you. I’m not sure if my laser can go up to 1000 speed. When we got our laser, they weren’t finished writing the manual (which seemed so crazy to me). They sent me one that was still being edited and not 100% specific to my machine. They never ended up sending me one (but it’s my fault for not following up). I’ll look in to this with Laguna! Thank you!
You are correct, you Laguna is not designed to travel that fast. We have many members with different systems, and the numbers provided might be for a different unit of measure. The current speed you have set is very reasonable.
The ‘Time Estimate’ found in the ‘Preview’ needs to be calibrated to your machine to get the closest possible calculations. If you are comparing time from RDWorks, the calibration of the LightBurn estimates might need adjusting to be more accurate.
Unfortunately this is not going to be an easy design to speed up, as it covers a lot of area, and it doesn’t have any large areas of empty space that you can easily avoid.
The best suggestion I have is to try running it with a larger interval / lower DPI value, like 0.15mm interval. That will take bigger steps between scanned lines, but if you go too high you’ll start to get noticeable gaps, or a visible stair-step on the angled parts. Try running it like that on scrap first to see if the result is ok.
If I could draw that well I wouldn’t have time for a laser engraver. 
