Hi all, I received my 5mp 150 degree camera a couple of weeks back and after a bit of struggle with calibration I had it up and running without issues. I haven’t used it in a week-ish, and now LightBurn sees the camera connected, but there is no image being transmitted. I have the same result in FaceTime.
Leads me to believe the camera itself has gone south, but this is my first laser and of course my first camera inside a laser so I don’t know if I might be missing something.
I am running Mac Tahoe 26.3.1, Lightburn has permissions to see the camera, and I’m on Lightburn 2.0.05. I am able to see an image in the camera control in LB if I switch to the built in camera on my macbook, or with my phone, but that newly installed camera just won’t give any image anywhere.
Anyone know any tricks to try? I have restarted LB, rebooted, plugged and unplugged the camera both at the USB port at the computer and at the camera itself, taken permissions away, given them back. Typical order of operations is shut LB, shut down computer, unplug camera, restart computer, restart LB. The camera does show up in the dropdown, just no image.
Yes, that’s my conclusion as well. I think it’s half dead. I am not sure how to request support for the camera itself from Lightburn since I bought it through the website, so I thought I’d start here.
Oh perfect, thank you! Yeah, no biggie on it being a weekend. I have lots of projects I can do that are not affected by this. I just want to get on the support radar.
In case this ends up helping anyone else using a separate USB camera in their laser, I found the solution. Support answered my email on Monday and we’ve been going back and forth through today (Tuesday). We tried some usual things, reinstalling Lightburn, checking firmware, making sure the laptop OS was up to date, etc.
I did some further digging because the camera was actually showing an image intermittently both in Lightburn and also Facetime, but it wasn’t predictable. Sometimes it worked, sometimes (most of the time) it did not. That seemed like an initialization issue or device conflict.
I finally hit on the fact that both my laser and the camera were sharing the same USB 2.0 bus, and the camera was drawing 500mA. That’s pretty much maximum power draw for that hub, and the laser was there too. As soon as I unplugged the laser from the USB, the camera started working. Interesting!
My laser only supports WiFi in it’s own mobile app, so that wasn’t an option. I got a powered USB hub and connected both the laser and the camera through that. BINGO. Rock solid camera connection. Bottom line, best not to rely on the computer bus to deliver the power the camera needs. If it lands on the edge of the limit like this one does, it may get enough juice to be recognized by Lightburn and other apps, but not actually be initialized for use.
Thanks for pointing me to the support email - they were very responsive and helped as much as they could.