Lightburn camera / raspberry pi

I see this question has been asked but not answered officially. Has anybody been able to figure out how to dual purpose the raspberry pi for the bridge and the usb input for the lightburn camera yet?

I don’t want to use it for remote operation (just making that clear ahead of time) but I am about to install the rpi bridge on my ruida to get rid of the usb cable connection which is extremely annoying seeing how I use my laptop to control my laser and not a dedicated laser pc.

Having to plug in a usb camera while it may not be the end of the world kind of puts me back into a position where I have 10,000 cords following me around everytime I want to do anything with this laser.

With that being said I completely understand the bridge is literally just as described and its only purpose is to enable a wifi connection that emulates a direct ethernet connection to the ruida.

However I can’t help but think somehow the rpi can also be a hub for the camera via one of it’s usb ports as well somehow and feed the stream via that same wifi connection that’s feeding the ruida data into lightburn.

I have read about people using an ip cam style setup but I’m assuming that’s not fully compatible with the software as intended and used more for monitoring purposes?

I’m overall new to lightburn so please forgive me if this is a noob question I’m just not sure how to approach this situation and would like some guidance if someone has any.

I’m using an rpi 4b with windows 11 if that helps.

TIA

Camera support for the bridge is planned, but not completed yet.

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Ok thank you for the reply I appreciate it before I went into a deep dive for nothing lol.

If you’re interested there has been some user-created efforts to cobble together a working solution. This is obviously not something supported or even endorsed officially:

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Definitely interested. I believe this is one of the threads I came across searching for the answer at first if lightburn will recognize the stream I am all for it.

I believe klipper uses mjpeg-streamer as it’s software to stream live feeds for my 3d printer I remember setting it up via crowsnest.

I can see this working out pretty good as long as lightburn will recognize the stream and calibrate correctly. I will give it a shot and see what happens and if it works I will let you guys know.

Lightburn will recognize it and calibrate it properly as long as the computer that you’re running Lightburn on recognizes the stream as a webcam. There are a number of pieces of software that can do that. Once that’s set up, it’s just a matter of calibrating it normally.

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Thank you I will probably be trying it shortly I will let you know how it goes.

Ok as promised here is the update.

I had to jump through a couple hoops to get this all to work but I followed the guide linked after I set up the bridge. At first I couldn’t get anything to show up period in lightburn.

Streaming off http://lightburnbridge.local:8080 did absolutely nothing. However http://lightburnbridge.local:8080/?action=stream pulled up my camera stream so that was a step in the right direction.

Next hurdle was lightburn wasn’t detecting the obs virtual cam so I went into settings and changed the camera from custom to default and then that showed up.

The obs virtual cam was pitch black in lightburn even though it was showing up in obs itself and would not stream an image. After further reading people were having luck installing virtual cam plugins and I still was not because most of them stopped getting support a while ago and weren’t compatible with windows 11 is my guess.

After searching for virtual cam plugins I came across this one GitHub - miaulightouch/obs-virtual-cam and installed it then followed the instructions as listed.

Preview Output:

  1. Select ToolsVirtualCam in the main OBS Studio window
  2. Press the Start button, then close the dialog
  3. Open your program (Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, etc.) and choose OBS-Camera as your webcam.

I now have a camera feed inside lightburn.

I might try to play with the source filter method as well just to see what it does but as of now there is a live feed and although I haven’t calibrated the camera yet so idk how good that works I feel like I am about 95% of the way there.

I am about to print the calibration card and I will update this again after I try to calibrate the lens.

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Alright so here is a not so positive update…

Not sure why but the bridge works fine, OBS virtual cam filter and the scene preview both pull the stream into lightburn however when I went to go ahead with this calibration sequence tonight I noticed every time I opened OBS my laser would disconnect.

I tried to play with all kinds of stuff and even went and uninstalled the virtual cam plugin that I just spoke of in the last post and it didn’t help. There’s something about OBS that knocks the laser offline and I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly but it’s definitely OBS.

The minute I close OBS the bridge works as expected again and my laser connects immediately.

I guess for now it’s back to plugging the cam in before I run jobs manually until I can figure it out.

If anybody has an answer for how to get around this I would love to hear it.

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