I am a Computer Engineer contracted out to work with the LightBurn software for the ThunderBird laser cutter and I have a question regarding pulling data from LightBurn for external use. Through a bit of digging, I am aware that you can enable logging in LightBurn which may have what I need but I am unaware if there is another (perhaps more graceful) way of doing this.
Basically, I just want to pull the runtime of the machine from LightBurn to use in a billing process. I originally thought this would be trivial as surely LightBurn logs somewhere when it tells a machine to start and when it receives the “I am finished” from the machine, but I have yet to find something of the sort, and am not totally convinced something of the sort does exist. The debug logs I have looked at did not have anything that stuck out.
Was wondering if anyone has ever tried to do something similar or has any insight on how this could be done?
When you Send a job, the machine stores the RD file and LightBurn knows nothing more about it. You start the job at the machine’s display / console, it runs, and that’s that.
When you Start a job, LightBurn begins streaming the file, the controller begins running it immediately, and the remainder of the file gets buffered as the controller chews away at the buffered data.
What’s missing is the Finished! notification: Ruida controllers apparently don’t send any status to LightBurn at any point, so it has no way to know what’s going on out there.
G-Code controllers operate in a similar manner, although generally with a much smaller internal buffer. LightBurn keeps the buffer full, but there’s no Finished! announcement when the controller finally finishes chewing through the buffered data.
As a result, LightBurn can tell you when it sent the file or started the job, but that’s it.