This is a continuation of 2 Cameras, One PC
Our makerspace has a single PC that drives 2 Redsail x700’s - which Lightburn does well. We wanted to add cameras for the two cutters, however, Lightburn does not deal with maintaining calibration, etc with one camera and multiple cutters.
Any chance this will get fixed?
cliff
MidsouthMakers
I think it would be vastly easier for the makerspace to have 2 PCs than to change code to work with 2 cutters. And it’s such an edge case that I’d be hard pressed to think it could possibly be worth the trouble.
Then again, I’m not involved in any way, but there are other wishlist items I’d much rather be adopted.
Just in case you are not aware,
LightBurn stores the camera calibration data in the device profile, so with two lasers, if they were called different things, and connected via Ethernet, the camera calibration data would be distinct.
There is an issue at the moment where the cameras are selected by name, not by unique ID, so it will always pick the first camera with a given name, meaning two “LightBurn” cameras won’t let you choose between them.
The code already works with 2 cutters - just trying to get the camera stuff worked out.
This may very well be our problem - both cameras are the same. Even changing the device name in Windows (in the registry) did not change the name in Lightburn.
Do you know what USB device parameter Lightburn pulls the ‘name’?
cliff
This behavior matches what I have seen. The calibration data remains tied to each laser, but since we can only use one camera at a time, calibration for the second laser doesn’t do us much good. We have had to resort to leaving our second camera unplugged so that it doesn’t trip up Lightburn. I agree that an ideal solution would be to have the cameras tied to our machine setups, so that when “Laser 1” is selected, then “Camera 1” is automatically used, and when “Laser 2” is selected then “Camera 2” is automatically used.
But if I am understanding you right, this won’t be possible with the current way the cameras are selected. We have tried re-naming the cameras in device manager, but Lightburn does not recognize the new names. Does anyone have suggestions or tips for what I can try next?
Thanks!
-Brant
I’ll look to see if I can find a unique ID of some kind that I can use to match the cameras instead of using just the name, but it’ll take some time. We’re moving to the other coast at the end of this month, so development will be impacted a bit.
Bump just to keep this topic open before it hits the 14 window.
Hope the move is going well! Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help out on our end.
-brant
It’ll be at least middle of next week before I’m in NY and set up again. I’ve logged a bug in our tracker so it won’t get lost.
Hope things went well with the move! Just wanted to check in on this bug again. I’ve been trying to keep up with the release notes, but I may have missed it if it’s been fixed by now. Also, just curious if the bug tracker you mentioned is public, so that I can keep a look out there instead of bothering you here.
Thanks again!
-Brant
I looked into this, and altered the settings so that the cameras are presented to you by name, but are internally selected by index in the list I get back from the system, so you should be able to select a second camera correctly, even with identical names. I’ve tested this, just now, with multiple LightBurn cameras plugged in to the PC, and selecting between two different cams with the same name does work.
First camera:
Second camera:
(Image quality is terrible because these still have the protective sticker on them)
Yay! Can I have this? I’ve currently been thinking about how I want to control multiple lasers and if I want to control them from one computer. This certainly makes the latter option more appealing. 
This has been in since at least 0.9.05, I think.
That is awesome news. We got both cameras set up, and it appears to be holding calibration correctly so far! I did notice that even after we renamed the cameras in device manager (to easily differentiate between them) they still show up as the same name in Lightburn. We have been using the camera feed to determine which camera needs to be selected, but I have 2 curiosities:
Do you know which parameter Lightburn pulls to show the name of the camera?
Would it be possible (and make sense) to assign a camera to a particular laser in the configuration, so that when a laser is selected it automatically switches to the appropriate camera?
Thanks, again, for your help!
-Brant
I use a value called “description” from my framework, but I’m not sure of the mapping from that to the info provided by the system itself. I’d have to dig through the framework code for that.
This is on our ‘to add’ list, yes
I was ready to post asking for this, I use 1 PC for 4 machines ans I’m about to add cameras to the rest 