Lasering PCBs! and any new automation features coming?

[raykholo (Ray Kholodovsky)]

Hi everyone,

Like many other people in the electronics community, we’re very excited about laser etching PCBs on the fly, now with DPSS lasers!

GitHub - opulo-inc/viagrid: Information around the PCB template standard,...

Stephen implemented the viagrid template in KiCad, and I’ve brought it over to https://tscircuit.com/ (please note that the viagrid template is still evolving and will probably move to other pattern designs in the future)

Since Seve of tscircuit is super into all this as well, he’s currently down the rabbit hole of figuring out an autorouter for different kinds of viagrid , pretty much any board that has a <via isAssignable /> is fair game; this does not exist in kicad but might soon exist in tscircuit.

Anyways, the goal is
a) to remove all the manual processing steps between KiCad and LightBurn as described in that GitHub, like “human, reposition this” or “human, change this setting within the LB UI”.

We can potentially accomplish this by tscircuit outputting an SVG that is “ready to go” in LB.

Better yet, tscircuit could auto-generate the .lbrn file directly for users, which again would have the prior SVG file baked in , but also with layers, power settings, data, already defined. This file should be “I can literally open this and press run”.

b) I know we’ve got the super basic API for actually loading the job file and running it with a terminal command. The question is whether there is anything new in the works regarding “more automation for job shop scenarios” and “more of a real API for controlling the software”.

I hope y’all can appreciate how cool this is. We’re gearing up to rapidly prototype PCBs using an ezcad-based DPSS laser and would love to use LightBurn to control it. But ideally we’d need more automation available as our factory will be largely automated and the laser will need to be coordinated with things like conveyors, XY tables, and robots to enable mass manufacture of larger PCBs in larger quantities.

Thanks!

[Rick (Technical Evangelist)]

Thanks @raykholo, I rang the bell for some feedback from J / Adam. Thanks for the share. We did see these interesting developments. When it popped up on the internal channels, a bunch of and smiles showed up in response.

[moors7 (Jordy Moors)]

Big plus here for anything automation related.

We wanted to use a laser at work to mark injection molded parts for traceability and had to resort to buying an “expensive AF” laser, because they could offer “easy integration”. The Chinese lasers, I would’ve had to use Lightburn with. That’d mean cobbling something together with scripts/command lines, which didn’t sit well with those in charge of the budget.

Probably still going to be some basic TCP commands, but at least they had the API thing going for them.

Would be cool to see lightburn offering a more industrial feature set as well!