Noob here - been using the micro sd card, but let me try connecting it with a USB cable.
The PC beeps when the USB cable // Falcon are connected to USB ports. And beeps when laser is disconnected. In lightburn, clicked on devices and then find my laser. the ‘scanning for devices’ bar goes 20%, 30% and then there’s a blank table of device info…
Next to devices button, I have a USB port pulldown. Only have USB1, usb3, USB4 and choose.
I tried all of them.
Then I installed creality design center. It finds the laser immediately (so not a USB cord / port issue)?
Rebooted PC and tried lightburn again (design center wasn’t running) same issue - not seeing the laser.
Not all controllers are automatically detected. If your machine came with a configuration file, just drop that onto the LightBurn grid. If not, do a manual Device setup. It is extremely easy and simple.
I did do that - I used the CR-Laser Falcon.lbdev file that came on the micro SD card. But I noticed the preview page of lightview would not show accurate run times for admittedly SMALL projects - it would say 30 seconds but turn out to actually take maybe a minite. YES! only 30 seconds difference. But also twice as long run time.
The differences may stay at 30 seconds on longer projects and I wouldn’t mind. But someone said connecting the engraver to the software (rather than use SD card) would let the software talk to the engraver and get actual numbers for max speed and accelerations? And YES, you’d think the CR-Laser Falcon.lbdev that came with the falcon would have the correct numbers? If so… thoughts on why on these small projects, they actually take 2x as long as the software says it would.
The novelty of using a micro sd card is wearing thin. At least with my 3d printer, I can have several files on the card and choose the one I want to print. With the falcon, only 1 file can be on the micro sd card.
AND the engraver DOES have a usb port and works with at least 1 other software - the creality design center. I’d rather pay for / use lightburn for the better interface. I’d figure a paid program would be able to connect to a relatively common? brand / model? ie - it’s user error?
My experience has been it is pretty accurate for vectors, but about half on images. The computation uses your laser parameters to make a best guess, but it cannot guess everything that affects the actual run time. If you do a Read in the Machine Settings window, it should be fairly accurate for vectors. The config file does not set the laser GRBL parameters, it only tells Lightburn how to talk to the laser. Until you do a Read, Lightburn is just guessing at the settings.
Vectors (Line mode): It will be pretty close. Images: I usually assume 2x whatever the Preview window says.
Remember, it is just a time estimate.
I assume USB is working based on you saying the time estimates are wonky. If not, let us know so we can help.