I have been using Lightburn at work for our production of front lighted mirrors, and have largely had to teach myself, as due to the current global situation we didn’t get a guy with the machine to teach anyone when we got it. So far so good, but I am running into an issue that I genuinely don’t know if its lightburn or the machine itself.
hexamirror.lbrn2 (180.9 KB)
This is something I did on Friday, pardon the layers being reversed in the output.
the issue is that this is taking a lot of time, more then what my preview is showing me.
This had a finish time of about 2 hours and 58 minutes. something similar I did earlier last week had a preview time of 1 hour 30 and ended up with 3 hours.
Am I missing something or am I just trying to make the machine run in ways it cant?
The machine I am using is a BRMlaser open bed, with a rdc6332g Ruida controller.
These settings only modify the preview speeds. If they are what your machine settings are then they should be close. Use the numbers from the controller here.
I thought Lightburn read these from the controller, but don’t know that.
i have an unfounded theory lightburn does not factr in acceleration speeds for the preview. mine is never right, but never that bad.
BTW, if you are doing thousands of traversal moves without lasering over the center of that design…split up the job into 2 layers and scan the job the long way in both directions?
The LightBurn simulator is estimating the time to produce based on the sim settings values shown. The most accurate time estimate will come from the controller itself, as it takes all required values into consideration when doing the full job planning.
I made a few changes. This boarder is now 4 groups, optimized to reduce overall travel, and I turned off (red) ‘Flood Fill’ on the Cut Settings Editor ‘Advanced’ tab.
I am pretty happy with the overall time estimate of jobs. It’s more of a sanity check for me to catch something really inefficient, like ungrouped shapes near each other, etc.
While the overall quality is better, it still seems to have the same discrepancy in time estimated vs time taken.
I am not sure what can be causing this, maybe its a lost cause?
it nearly doubles the timer, same as at the start.
Obviously I am not expecting the preview to have it right by the second but an entire hour added seems excessive.
As a work around why not adjust the speed in the preview so that it matches the actual speed you are seeing. It appears that the difference might be “rapid moves”.
On DSP controllers, LightBurn does NOT currently include the time taken during automatic overscan (handled by the controller) where it overshoots the design. Depending on the size of the job, and the speed, this can range from negligible to dominant.
If the job is wide, spending most of its time “at speed”, or slow, so overscan doesn’t add much, it won’t affect the estimate too much.
On the other hand, if the job is narrow and the speed is high, or you have very low acceleration, it can end up adding a lot of time. If you send the job to the controller, then use the controller itself to calculate the job time (in the files menu) that will give you very accurate times.
so after a bit of struggling, I find out how to do the calculating, which gives me about 10 mor minutes tehn then LB preview.
Which makes no sense compared to my previous time.
…and then I realise I somehow managed to screw up and run the OLD version of the file not the new one the second time.
So I think that puts me at problem solved.
I apologize for the mixup and thank you all for the help.
Don’t know if it’s supposed to work this way, but on my Ubuntu it place 0’s in the time on the first ‘Calculate’ then wil properly fill it the second time. When I forgot to upload the new speeds and image, it didn’t fill it with zeros…
The ‘Calc Time’ function in the controller can take a significant amount of time to actually do the calculation, so LightBurn doesn’t wait until it’s finished. If you just refresh the file list window periodically it’ll update once the controller has finished calculating.
