Background:
I use magnets on the honeycomb bed to support my material (predominantly 3mm MDF) away from the bed to help reduce the blow back of residue as masking everything is not practical due to the amount of weeding that would be required. The project pieces are intricately cut over the majority of the workpiece so positioning the magnets out of the laser path is difficult and since 3mm MDF can easily sag or have a bow, multiple support points are desirable. Once the material is in place I use another magnet on the top of the material to effectively clamp the MDF in place thus leaving an air gap to the bed. Since my magnets are only 10mm high and the gap between the nozzle and the material is around 13mm, the nozzle is free to move anywhere over the material once clamped.
Current solution:
I either cut a template referenced to the home position which I lay on the bed so that I know where the magnets need to be or using the “Move” functions I manually position the laser over each of the points of the project where I can put a magnet and then drop a magnet under the nozzle.
Both of these solutions have issues, the first being that I would need an awful lot of templates for all the different projects I do or in the second scenario using the “Move” functions I would need to manually enter each position every time I do a job or save/recall every single position. Neither of these is very practical as they are time consuming.
New Feature Idea:
- Allow users to draw special location markers on their projects, ie. markers/points that are only for indication and do not fire the laser. The current system of layers likely can already provide this.
- Provide a playback function that moves the laser to each of those points in succession but pauses when it gets to each point until the user clicks “Next” at which point the laser moves to the next point in sequence. In this way the user can easily configure the laser nozzle (not the beam itself on a CO2 but maybe on diode lasers) to point to each position on the bed where a support/clamp/whatever needs to be positioned.
This capability would make positioning clamps, supports etc. very quick and straight forward and allow the positions to be saved with each project.
Hope this is seen as worthwhile.
PS. I’m enjoying Lightburn…it’s great software…Thanks.
Realised after post that there is a new features section separate from the forum.