I do a lot of our designs within Lightburn itself. The raw design is done in a different art softwares, imported into lightburn and then there is about 20-30 minutes of finalizations I have to make in Lightburn itself for the design to be laser ready.
A lot of what I do in light burn is repetitive. I’m wondering if there is a way to record or write macros, similar to what is possible in Excel.
For example, one of the repetitive tasks I do is converting dozens (anywhere from 20-40) objects to bitmap. Because they are so spread out, I need to convert them one at a time or the laser will try and engrave them all at once and there will be a ton of white space (wasted laser travel time).
So I click each object, convert to bitmap, set the DPI, click OK. I do this 20-40 times per file. Very repetitive and a macro would handle this in seconds.
I don’t think this is possible within Lightburn itself, but wondering if it’s possible from at the PC level via python or something similar.
The ability to add macros would literally save me dozens of hours per week.
I’ve used in the past a program known as Macro Express. It’s not free but it is immensely powerful, especially if one can translate the desired actions into keystrokes, but it’s not limited in that manner.
There are other free programs that offer similar features, but that portion of my alleged mind is currently empty of useful references.
You’ve mentioned Python which implies you have some skill with programming. As such, Macro Express would come easily to hand and the same may apply to other free programs of similar capability.
I’m curious - why do you need to convert your vector artwork to bitmaps?.
It may help to take a step back and for us to try and understand the full context of the problem, as there may be a different solution available?
If you can attach here a project file with an example of your original art, and a second file with it converted to bitmap with settings ready for output, that will help (send to support@lightburnsoftware.com if the art is commercially sensitive, or better - substitute similar but non-sensitive art for here).
It really helps if we know where the frustrating tasks are…maybe bitmaps are needed in your operation?..maybe we need to look at ways of optimizing the output of images with a lot of white space?
Because they are extremely complex designs (100k+ nodes), and if I don’t convert to bitmap the program crashes. Especially when trying to preview the artwork or when running an outline function.
Optimizing the output of images would be nice but only solves one issue.
What if one of the 40 objects you converted to bitmap, needs to be tweaked, altered, etc. You then need to undo until all images are vector again (because they were all grouped at the same time) every time you need to make a tweak to one of the images.
Also, this was just one example. I have dozens of repetitive tasks I could automate since the keystrokes/process are the same.
No need to add a file here as the file is irrelevant.
I have a lot of repetitive tasks (series of keystrokes and button pressing) that I would like to automate.
I can’t confirm having used LightBurn and Macro Express, as I don’t have repetitive actions to perform in LightBurn, but I’ve used Macro Express to automate “challenging” web form entries, as well as automating file folder specific backup/copy actions. I’d be surprised to find a Windows compatible program that won’t accept Macro Express directives.
What program are you using to create these images? 100,000 nodes is pretty excessive. You can considerately reduce the number of nodes in LB without losing too much detail.