I design on a computer in my office and control my laser from another in the shop. Is there a way to passively share the settings for both instances of Lightburn using a shared drive or folder?
Can you explain the scenario that you’re trying to solve for? Want to make sure I understand what you’re trying to do.
I just want my default settings to be the same on both computers. If i change a setting in my office, I’d like the same settings to be applied on the shop computer…
And when I said passively I meant that I don’t want to have to export from one and import to the other
Are there specific settings you’re talking about? And do you anticipate changing these often?
There isn’t a simple way to do this, no.
I’ve not tried it but you might be able to use FreeFileSync on both computers to sync to a shared folder on the network or a cloud folder. I don’t know what OS you’re using but on windows I think the file you’d need to sync would be ‘prefs.ini’ in your ‘C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\LightBurn’ Folder. As I said, I’ve not tried it so it might cause issues if the LightBurn versions are different on the two machines.
I can’t imagine a scenario where this ends well without explicit support in LightBurn or a very regimented set of steps to be followed with every use. From what I’ve seen LightBurn doesn’t like the prefs files to be fiddled with unexpectedly. I can see a system that keeps the file in sync but not in a seamless way like how it’s being asked.
Whatever setting is involved in flipping my design when I open it on the shop computer.
The following is a post I made on a FB Group for my laser. It might explain WHY I’m looking to share my settings between computers:
I think I’ve solved the horizontal and vertical mirroring problem that I was having with Lightburn. I design on one computer in the office and I engrave and cut from another computer via USB connection in my shop.
I save my files to a google drive folder that I can access from either computer. When opening the lightburn files on the shop computer, the files were vertically and/or horizontally mirrored and nothing I would do on that shop computer would fix the issue and make the design burn correctly. Manually flipping would make the design SHOW correctly on the monitor but it would still burn incorrectly.
Then I read a response by someone stating that the two computers probably had different lightburn settings applied.
Since most of my preference changes are made on the shop computer when burning and testing, I went to that computer and clicked to File > Export Prefs and saved my shop computer’s preferences to the google drive folder. (You could also save to a flash drive) I then went inside to the office computer and clicked to File > Import Prefs and imported that file to my office computer. Then I opened a known problem design file in the office and just re-saved it to the google drive folder and went outside and opened it in the shop.
The file opened correctly with no mirroring on the monitor. I burned a small section as a test and it burned correctly as well. Hope this helps someone else.
The solution that was implemented makes sense for the symptom you were having. Essentially the machine origin was likely set differently between the 2 installations. However, once set, these types of things aren’t likely to change often.
The types of things you will be doing on your design computer like layouts and cut settings are stored in the file itself and will travel with the file. So you won’t need to update those things. If for any reason you do need to make a LightBurn or device level settings change you could go through the same process you did or simply make the change in both places.
Is there a specific type of change you’re particularly concerned about?
No, it was just the horizontal and vertical flipping that was getting me
Okay. Honestly you should be good unless you get a new laser with a different machine origin that you need to switch around for. And in that case there’s no amount of syncing that would help you get out of that.
I’ve considered submitting a feature request to have LightBurn abstract out device configurations but that poses its own challenges.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.