LightBurn Camera usage for a save gcode workflow

[gsrunion (Steve Runion)]

Question:
Can a LightBurn supported camera be used for work placement in a save-gcode-to-file arrangment?

Background:
My laser manufacturer (XTool) is finally opening up LightBurn support for my machine (LaserBox Co2) by allowing their proprietary software to be used as a gcode sender. In this flow you do your design in LightBurn, save the gcode to file, and then use their software to push to the machine.

In this arrangement you are relying on absolute positioning in the workspace to make sure your design in LightBurn translates to cut lines on the material where you want them. Since the manufacturer seems to not want to support gcode streaming (I may come up with a man in the middle application that can fake that) or exposing the machines built in camera I would certainly consider purchasing one of LightBurns supported cameras.

[berainlb (PY)]

I believe this could be made to work.

The biggest challenge will be in completing the “Calibrate Camera Alignment” process. There’s no “Save gcode” mechanism for the alignment process so I suspect you’ll have to do this manually.

Check out this post for how you could go about this:

Camera Alignment - Unable to engrave

Not sure if I understand the actual complication. Are you saying that you’re unable to create the alignment targets due to the delay requirement? If that’s the case then you can build any alignment targets that you like. It doesn’t need to be done during the alignment process. Create 4 targets where the centers of the targets are arranged at the corners of a 180 mm square. The size is very important. The targets should be numbered 1-4 clockwise starting from the top-left. Center the targets …

Once completed I suspect your workflow should work fine with the camera.

[gsrunion (Steve Runion)]

Thanks for sending the link that way. When I get time to sit down and really read it I will have a look.