Support (or plans) for scripts?

When starting with a new material, I do a bunch of test burns at different speeds and laser levels to look for charring, what speeds work best for cutting, etc.

I was thinking it would be cool to have a script where I could create a 5x5 grid of small (2 cm on a side) squares. Along one axis, they would decrease print speed (so light to dark) and along the other, they’d increase laser power. Then I could see what squares look good, and refine my search by shrinking the ranges and printing another grid.

I could easily create this programmatically, but there’s no current scripting language for LightBurn, is there?

I didn’t see anything in the docs, and the closest I saw in the forum was this one, suggesting that we use Python to generate a LBRN file

I also saw this post from a few years ago that mentioned it might integrate python, but it looks like that’s pretty out of date

Thanks!

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Hi GameMaker,

We do a similar test, running a program that we created once.
What you can do, is create the grid with multiple layers for each verticle (so different speeds each step). Then for squares in the other direction, there is something called power scale. This can be found under the properties tab.

Check out the thread here: Material Cut/Scan Test Files - Power Scale

Cool - that’s good to learn about!

That sounds like a manual way to do it, though - creating a grid, then setting the speed horizontally, and the power scale vertically.

You said you are “running a program that you created once”, but I didn’t see any mention of a script or program. Did you create that manually, or did you use a program or script to create it?

This will be useful to set up the power scale test, but I do have other ideas for customization that we could create with a script, so still curious if @LightBurn is planning any sort of scriptable API.

Thanks for the link!

Nah, we have created one manually once and saved it as a lightburn file so an “easy open and go” on each new material. I’ve heard that the lightburn files are quiet straight forward / human, have you opened one in a text editor? Don’t have any files on hand, but if you can edit an existing project you can also update / edit it with a python/php/JS or whatever you prefer :slight_smile:

Yup - totally. I think Oz said that at some point, too - that’s what I’m planning to pursue if I go that way, but figured I’d ask first. Thanks!

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