Hello my wonderful people, greetings from Greece!
I’m a beginner in laser engraving and I’ve had the Creality Falcon2 Pro for quite some time now.
I’ve also purchased the full version of LightBurn, but I just can’t seem to learn how to use it properly.
To be honest, I’m completely discouraged, because no matter how many tutorials I watch, I still can’t figure things out.
First, I’ve lost the color palette in LightBurn — I’ve tried every possible fix, but it just won’t appear.
Second, I bought some small wooden blanks for keychains, but I can’t align the laser correctly above the material, and my engravings keep coming out crooked.
I’m really sorry if this post is off-topic, but you’re honestly my last hope.
Thank you all so much for your time and any advice you can give!
I sympathise with your situation. I bought a 40W Creality Falcon2 Pro machine a few months ago and was frustrated with the difficulty of placing materials accurately on the rails. Due to the lens distortion I also found the camera control worse than useless so I thought about what to do and came up with a genius (!!) solution. Apologies if the following is rather long-winded, though.
I started by measuring the internal dimensions of the cabinet and came up with a width of 565mm and a useful depth of 610mm, although I think you could make that 620mm. I bought a sheet of 6mm mdf board and cut out a piece equal to the dimensions I just mentioned. I opened the drawer of my machine and slid the piece of mdf over the black metal support bar and pushed it in until it sat on the rails (rather than a honeycomb bed) as far back and to the left as it would go.
I then went to Lightburn and created a template consisting of a cut line round the full 400mm x 415mm area of the laser bed along with a series of horizontal and vertical grid lines to be etched every 10mm with some extra etching lines and labels every 20mm.
I ran the job after making sure the laser head had been sent to the home position and ended up with what is effectively an outer frame with a removable centre, the latter being the exact dimensions of the laser’s cutting area and with the 0,0 origin of the laser beam bottom left. I also added adhesive tape measures on the left and bottom sides of the outer frame. What I now have is a near-accurate way to place materials in the engraver and know that the position corresponds to the same position in Lightburn.
For example, let’s say I have a square piece of wood that is 50mm x 50mm and which I only want to engrave. I position the piece of wood on my ‘jig’ so the bottom left corner is located at, say, the junction of 40mm x 40mm. I then go to Lightburn and create a 50mm x 50m square tool path and make sure the bottom left corner of that tool path is located at 40mm both on the X & Y axes. I now create my design within the bounds of that 50mm x 50mm tool path and, so long as the laser head has been sent to the home position, my design SHOULD engrave on the wood exactly as it is positioned in Lightburn.
For jobs that might involve cutting, I would remove the centre section of my jig and I still know that the home origin of the laser beam (rather than the laser head) is still in the bottom left of the jig’s outer frame. You would be able to use this information in combination with Lightburn to create, for example, Tim’s keychain jig.
