I have purchased a OMTech 60w Red and Black laser with Lightburn. I plan on having this in my workshop and passing control to a desktop located in the house. I have already purchased a Raspberry Pi 4 with the intention of using Lightburn Bridge to pass the data to the desktop. I understand that there is currently no way to pass that camera data through the Lightburn Bridge, but is is coming. Is there any timeframe for this? Can I offer my help coding or testing this feature?
Does Lightburn support ip cameras yet? If so I could add a pi zero 2w and hook the camera to that with a otg cable.
Camera support for the Bridge is planned but we have no ETA and there is no current plan to support generic IP cameras directly. Support for cameras is done on the Bridge itself, we just need to update LightBurn to support it. But at this time we’ve had to focus on other things. We will announce more as soon as we can.
I have a quick question about the LightBurn Bridge software. What is the base OS used? Id the the default Raspberry Pi OS, with some pre-configured software for your bridge? If so, it might be possible to set up VirtualHere USB server on the Pi and use that to pass the USB camera from the Pi to the network.
I ask this because I do not yet have all of my equipment. My laser will be delivered Monday the 6th, the Pi arrives Friday the 3rd. So I am not able to verify what OS the LightBurn Bridge software is using. Is it possible to install the LightBurn Bridge via ‘apt install’ command? That would be great if I could use a pre configured Pi and just install the LightBurn application on an existing Raspberry Pi.
Bridge is based on Pi OS, yes - but it’s packaged as more of an appliance. Any modification of the underlying software or configuration will void your warranty.
At this time we only provide the software as a complete SD card image. To make it work, we need very tight control over the system and cannot have anything running that we do not expect to be.
With the extra power of the Pi 4, I think running something like VirtualHere should not be a problem.
I think putting that LightBurn Bridge software in the the pi repository so that it can be installed via ‘apt install’ would be a really great move on your part. After all you still require a key to use the software, and the LightBurn software will not run on a Pi, so you would have tight control over the LightBurn software. Making the Bridge software open source would be great.
Is it possible to ssh into the Pi that is running the LightBurn Bridge software? It would be great to be able to keep the OS up to date, without being able to remote into the Pi there is a concern about the OS being patched for security vulnerabilities. I would like to know that the OS that is running on the PI is being kept up to date, since that device is on my network (which has access to data that is private).
Are the login and password available for the PI OS?
@Thepctech
As a long time Linux user, I 100% understand where you are coming from.
However, there’s a few reasons why we packaged it this way:
As previously stated, we see this as an appliance. It’s like any other internet enabled device you might buy these days - you may expect occasional firmware updates but in general you hook it up and forget about it. We worked very hard to make it so that would be the user experience. Easy setup and it just works.
The source code for the Bridge, like LightBurn, is closed source. Packing it merely as an OS image allows us tighter control. Open sourcing the code is not in the cards at the moment.
Allowing users to modify the OS image puts an added support burden on LightBurn staff. If someone is having an issue with their Bridge and they’ve modified it, we have no way of knowing if the problem is with our code or something that they did.
Allowing installation of the software onto any Pi with any random software already running on it is problematic for the same reason stated above.
Yes, you can SSH into the Pi and that’s even enabled by default. The login is the standard Pi login - we haven’t changed that. However, this is ONLY for viewing the status dashboard which will automatically launch when you login (it also displays if you plug in a monitor). Bypassing this dashboard voids any warranty or obligation for support for the above noted reasons.
I understand this may seem a little hard, but we are trying to provide the smoothest experience for our users and doing things this way. If this was custom hardware that we shipped with everything already installed, I really don’t believe anyone would question it. But because it’s Pi based people immediately think of what else they might do with it. The Pi was just the most cost effective solution for us, as it is for many other commercial applications.