Well, I failed to make it usable just with Excel, so I’ve given up. While Excel can import .xml files, it cannot save them to anywhere close to their original format, and LightBurn rejects them. I’ve done a lot of development with Visual Basic for Applications (macro language for Excel), but have little experience with .xml files.
Seems like the entire laser industry thinks that specifying the laser power as a percentage of an unknown and unspecified laser power is just fine. I think it’s shortsighted and stinks…
Hi.
I assume that’s just the nature of the way lasers are generally controlled, via PWM or similar pulsed type control.
With that, the power is “easily” controlled by controlling the pulse width percentage.
That control method and controller designs also predate our “hobby lasers” by a decade or a two, so no wonder it was -and still is- the power adjustment method of choice.
Back in the day, there was no need for anything fancier, since laser machines -or any CNC machines for that matter- were sold and used as a package: the hardware, the control, the firmware and sometimes even the software.
Randomly swapping components just wasn’t possible, or at least not feasible.
That said, even though I pretty much gave up on trying to learn coding in the late 80’s, I see no reason why there couldn’t be any other method of control as well.
A method that would serve better in the cases like this one.
It probably wouldn’t be as universally compatible as the percentage based, but easily configurable for several different lasers of the same design.
Regards,
Sam
Hi Jack,
I’ve come up with the same kind of issue in other contexts, and have found that sometimes I have to do a layer of manual data entry to make it work.
If I understand what you’re saying, it sounds like this is one of those situations.
If the converion value calculations are correct in Excel, I’d still like to know what the macro looks like and am willing to do the manual entry of those values into a ligtburn materials library.
Thanks,
Jerry Kornbluth
I think you’re right, but I hate to be a slave to tradition when it no longer serves our needs. I have a “hobby” CNC machine a couple of laser printers, and a complete woodshop. All the machines fully capture enough relevant physical parameters to remove any operational ambiguity. I have a friend who owns a large manufacturing company that has a couple kilowatt-level lasers, and they don’t specify power in percentage. They use Watts. In our cooperative we have members with diode lasers with 5, 10, 20 and now 40 Watts.
Currently I use NotePad++ which is a free full-featured editor that can open, modify and save .clb files without changing the file extension. It’s a manual process, but you can use its Find on the terms “speed” and “power” to find the line of the entries that need changing for each and every cut in the library. I’m not aware of any macro language that could automate this for us.
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