Multiple lasers, one computer

LightBurn Software Questions
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I did find the following post that contained somewhat of an answer to my question:

but not completely. I’m on a Mac and both lasers have Ruida controllers and are connected via ethernet… could be a third one too if you can figure out how to work a Trotec so I can dump Job Control :wink:

Question:
In Lightburn I have “Machine 1” and “Machine 2” added and they work.
I made two copies of Lightburn: “Lightburn machine 1” and Lightburn machine 2". Both instances started and I thought I could have a “Machine 1” connected to “Lightburn machine 1” and 2 to the other one, but no.
It’s only on the first Lightburn that I start that I can switch device (I see “Ready” when ever I switch device). The second Lightburn says “Disconnected” on which ever device I choose. Is there a way to have one instance of the program connected to its own laser?

Question/suggestion:
I know it doesn’t exist now. But would it be possible to have a tabs inside Lightburn for each of your devices?

I haven’t really come up with a smooth workflow yet for multiple lasers. How are you guys doing it?

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We provide a voting site for you to request new features. And looks like you are not the first to want this. :wink:

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Thanks! I know wear the badge “I voted” with pride :wink:

But back to how it is today. Is there any way to do it smoothly? 25% of the time I keep cutting on the wrong machine, just because I forgot to switch device.

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There is no technical reason why two instances of the software can’t run different lasers. On a PC I run more than one copy and have them talk to different lasers, and that works, so I can’t see why it wouldn’t behave similarly on a Mac.

Having two tabs within the app itself is feasible, but would require a substantial amount of rework - many places in the software assume there is only one connected laser, one undo system, and so on. I plan to allow multiple pages within the same project, but not multiple projects loaded at the same time.

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Having two instances talk to two different lasers would work great, if it worked on Mac also. No matter which instance I start first, that’s the one that talks to the lasers. The second one just says “No device found” at the bottom, no matter which device I choose.

If it worked. Would it be possible to have each instance have it remember what device it used last?

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LightBurn saves its preferences in one place, so there’s no way for a given instance to know that it’s different. I’ll try connecting multiple devices on my Mac with multiple instances and see if I can reproduce the issue.

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Great. Thank you for testing it.

Regarding the preferences I thought I’d mention it in case it was an easy thing. I’m guessing the percentage that has more than one device is not very high so not a very big market :slight_smile:

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Lots of people have multiple lasers, but I would guess very few of them are running multiple lasers simultaneously from a single Mac. :slight_smile:

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