I’ve been using LightBurn at work for over a year now, and there’s one feature that would really make my workflow much easier – the ability to set and use material thickness dynamically.
When I order 3mm plywood, it rarely comes as exactly 3.00 mm – sometimes it’s 2.7 mm, other times 3.2 mm. This small variation creates issues when I design boxes or other objects with interlocking parts. I have to manually adjust all the slot sizes to ensure everything fits properly.
What I’d love to have is a way to define the actual thickness of the material before running the job, and then have all relevant slots or holes automatically adjust based on that value. For example, if I design a slot to fit a 3.2 mm piece, but I enter a material thickness of 2.8 mm, the software would automatically reduce the slot size by 0.4 mm to keep the fit tight.
It would be great if LightBurn allowed us to assign specific holes or shapes to follow this dynamic adjustment rule, so I don’t have to redesign everything from scratch every time the material thickness changes slightly.
Great option – but it would be even better if it could be linked to a specific layer. That way, I could just change the material thickness, and all relevant slots or shapes on that layer would automatically adjust (for example, reducing the size by 0.4 mm from the material thickness).
This would be super helpful, especially when I have repeatable elements where slot width is critical.
I see where you were going when you said “automatically adjust”.
The problem with doing this automatically is that not every shape that looks like a slot is, in fact, one.
For this reason, you need to select the slots to resize, and choose “Resize slots in selection”.
Pinning the option to the toolbar would certainly be the easier solution, without the risk of introducing unintended, automatic adjustment of tabs.
Toolbars are not customizable at this point, but I can offer you to set a keyboard shortcut if you use the function a lot!
That’s why it would be really helpful to have an option where I can select specific slots and assign them to a variable – for example, on Layer 3.
The idea is that I could mark certain slots as “dynamic” or “linked to a variable,” and then just update the value (e.g. change from 2.6 mm to 2.8 mm) before running the job. The assigned slots would automatically adjust based on the updated variable.
In short: I select the slots, assign them to a variable, and whenever I change that variable’s value, the slot sizes update accordingly — all within the same project, without redesigning everything manually.pogrubiony tekst
Asking for “dynamic” setting of values would require full parametric editing, which would be an intense amount of work.
I’m all for automation, but I see many possible caveats and unwanted automatic adjustments when doing it in this case.
Since the existing system works..
We welcome suggestions on new features at https://lightburn.fider.io/ - we’d suggest you make a post there detailing the feature you wish to see. We use Fider to help us choose which features are most important for us to develop next.
I know the software i use with my CNC has something line this. When you do the design if you put -t in as the depth of cut in the toolpath it will automatically adjust everything when you change the stock thickness.
Another option is to scale the “original” up or down to the desired thickness, if it is acceptable that all dimensions change by percentage. I often use this for boxes.
If the outer dimensions of the box cannot be changed, I use LB’s fine “Resize Slots” tool.With a little practice it doesn’t take many minutes.
I think the shortcomings of the LB function has already been discussed. I think it will be impossible to correctly resize all slots automatically and keeping all variances working. Though, there are two option I would use here:
If those objects are generated, keep the generator settings and adjust them for every project. Then you can import them nicely into LB. But it might not be suitable for every project.
Use the kerf offset value. This also depends on the project, but for small variances, I think that’s the easiest way to go.
