In preview mode, I would have thought that Lightburn would send some kind of feedback if your design falls outside the cutting limits of your machine. Instead it just doesn’t try and cut those parts. Then when you run the job on your laser machine you get the totally unobvious message Frame Slop Error!.
I know that LB doesn’t know the exact position of your laser head, so if you are set to start from ‘Current Position’ it won’t know how much of your cutting area is available. Is that the reason it doesn’t give feedback?
Thanks for your fast reply
I have a fairly powerful ‘design’ pc that I use to design projects in CAD and to set up all of the laser settings with LB. This is some distance away from my laser cutter, so I have a laptop near my laser that actually does the driving. I would guess that a lot of people have a similar setup. I use the preview function, on my design pc, to make sure that I haven’t missed anything before I send the job to the laser laptop. I expected the preview function would flag all issues that I am going to have when it comes to run time. Your statement ‘LightBurn doesn’t give the error because the controller does it for you’, whilst true, isn’t very helpful given my workflow.
I get that LB doesn’t necessarily know the position of the laser head and that makes predicting all oob conditions impossible, but I have tried a variety of scenarios and the only time it ignores oob shapes is when Start From: is set to Absolute Coords. When Current Position or User Origin are selected it quite happily previews shapes that are way outside the cutting limits of my machine.
Request - add more intelligence to the preview function to decrease the likelihood of the job failing at runtime. For this issue I would suggest that any shapes outside, or partly outside, the LB grid don’t show in preview. Ideally this would include some warning that not all shapes are in bounds. Also, preview could assume that the machine is at the red square machine origin and do the math, based on overall size of the job and the job origin setting, to flag a possible oob condition.
If you have a GCode based machine, I already do checks to see if the job will fit when you click ‘Send’ or ‘Start’. I didn’t do this with the Ruida because the hardware does it for you, but it would be simple enough to add, and it’s on a toggle even for GCode machines, so users could disable it easily.
On most controllers, I’m able to read the mode and the origin location, but that only works if you’re connected. When using ‘Current Position’ or ‘User Origin’, if you aren’t connected to the machine I can’t tell where your laser head is positioned, so I couldn’t tell you if the job is in bounds or not in that situation, but the laser laptop would when you tried to run the job.
I understand the situation Oz, but what do you think of my suggestions that, at least partly, address this apparent lack of LB intelligence?
My background is R&D in a high tech hardware/software environment, so I can relate to these issues and I know what’s involved in addressing them. However, through my involvement with a laser machine support forum, I have discovered that many LB owners are not technically savvy. They largely just want to make their artistic creations with the least hassle. The situation that prompted me to post this issue was raised by a person today that just could not believe her job failed with a Frame Slop Error after it had ‘passed’ preview mode. She was going to uninstall/reinstall LB to try and cure it! Others who responded to her forum posts agreed with that course of action.
Honestly one of our largest support issues is people refusing to come here to get correct answers, and instead preferring the instant but completely wrong answers they get on FB.
As I already said, I’m willing to enable the feature for DSP controllers as well, and since it’s already on a user toggle switch, it could be disabled if unwanted.
Regarding making the preview do it, or making the other modes default to some arbitrary starting point so they can guess, that’s likely to cause as much confusion as it solves.
It’s not unreasonable for me to draw a workspace frame in the preview if I know where it is, but I don’t want a pop-up error when you preview unless absolutely necessary. Pop-ups tend to quickly because ‘automatic dismiss’, at which point they’re useless again.
You could draw a workspace frame in preview, but then you would lose the auto zoom feature in preview wouldn’t you?
I agree that warning popups do get ‘auto dismissed’ after a while, I do that with my 3D printer’s slicer when it gives me 3 or 4 in a row! But that doesn’t necessarily make them a bad idea if they are appropriate and well-worded - especially if you have a toggle in setup…
Ultimately, it’s your call of course. I said I understand the situation, I didn’t say it was easy
Btw, this was the file that gave the frame slop error. The user was running a test because her laser wasn’t cutting well on the right. I don’t know where the laser head was physically, but it’s easy to imagine that it wasn’t top left.
