As I’m sure some of you know, I’m a bit “special” when it comes to the LB camera system for my laser. I’ve always spent a lot of time getting the most optimal, usable results from my camera. I use it primarily to place small, specially shaped parts on relatively expensive material and to “finish” prefabricated items with special (engraving) customer requests.
But it’s almost as much the challenge itself that I also appreciate very much, to get things working perfectly.
It was time for a physical camera adjustment, because I thought a perpendicular camera view/placement would be more accurate than one where I tried to center the entire visible working area of my laser.
It halved the misalignment in the Y direction, which strangely didn’t have the overwhelming overall effect on accuracy. I assume that the misalignment of the lens is internally finely regulated.
Since I have a Windows system at my disposal, which is the only OS that LB supports with image adjustment (light, exposure …) for the actual camera setup, I spent a Sunday trying to make it as precise as possible.
No matter how many times I tried, my lens calibration never got above 89%.
In return, April Tag camera alignment worked very well for the first time, in fact as well as the manual adjustment that I have gradually mastered. It is incredibly fast and painless. I think the lighting conditions are crucial, I used manual exposure and brightness settings.
I have made a target plate that I can use again and again, because I can reposition it 100% precisely.
Then I did a mean deviation test, to identify good or bad areas that the camera captures.
Then a standard compromise must be found for correcting the deviation, it is in this Windows setup at X: -0.1 and at Y: +0.2mm.+ This gives me a very acceptable precision for most tasks. If I need further accuracy I can find an area on the machine bed that is extra precise.
The pictures show some of the process and the last picture shows a final test.
A square is filled with a smaller square and a cross target, in all 4 corners of the working area of my laser. The small MDF is rotated freehand and each of the smaller squares and targets are manually placed.
I think it is a very nice result and should give inspiration to all those who do not think the camera system in LB is usable - or say it is a toy.
Just you wait - we’ve been fairly backed up with MillMage development, but with the new camera system abilities there are many more features we’re hoping to get to in the future that utilize the newly improved Camera tools!
I think back at the first LBX (the one before the one last year) they already announced a new camera system with live tracking and calibration, automatic height adjustment, and more
So nothing has changed here, it’s sad. I can never achieve a comparable quality with my Mac without exposure control as I can with Windows computers.
How do you do it in the office/workshop with your computers? Do you only have Windows PCs?
Are there any LightBurn users on Mac OS who actually use their camera seriously? If so, I would love to exchange experiences about it.
Update: I have downloaded “Webcam Settings” from the app store, costs about $8-10.
It was an attempt to end the frustrations that I have with LightBurn’s lack of ability to control LightBurn’s own camera settings under Mac OS.
“Webcam Settings” works very well and provides ample setting/adjustment options for the camera itself, including exposure…
Conclusion: There is an external solution for LightBurn’s not handling their own camera settings under MacOS, which costs $10. - and it works!
LB should point out the problem on the LB sales page and the option that exists to solve it externally. It will make the camera $10 more expensive but saves tons of frustration for new customers with MacOS.
Question for the developers: How can it be that “Mactaris” can change all camera settings at the same time that LightBurn says that it can’t be done because Mac doesn’t allow it. ?
I have bought this app to test, and on my end it does not allow editing of hardware settings such as exposure. Only ‘post’ edits such as brightness, contrast, hue, etc. It is essentially applying filters to the feed (a lossy process that reduces image quality), not actually changing the settings of the camera hardware and giving me a better image.
If I switch to manual exposure and move the slider, the camera feed exposure does not change.
Can you show some video of you changing the exposure and the effect it has on the camera feed?
and let me know what camera you have?
Hi Billie,
I have downloaded and installed the app on both my Macbook pro and I can assure you that it works, it works exceptionally well.
However, I have chosen manual exposure because the automatic is not fast/efficient enough to react to extremes. Like for example from a light MDF board to a small piece of wood on the honeycomb.
Manually I can perfectly compensate for these extremes.
What does not work is the sharpness adjustment, which is logical with a manual sharpness setting on the camera lens itself.
If you open the app and adjust the parameters, you will be able to see the “live” effect in the right window from the camera settings, the main screen itself must be updated every time something is changed.
In the “Webcam Settings” itself there is the option to determine the read and write intervals to and from the camera you may need to activate them too.
Remember to start the “Webcam Settings” app - before LightBurn!!!
I have tested 2 different LB cameras, the last one I have swapped for a 4MP/85 degree for the first one (4MP/90 degree) in NY at our nice conference. We have discussed the topic for a couple of years now, ask Collin and Aaron, they might remember me
With the results I have achieved today, I am very interested in testing the functions with an 8MP LB camera, it must give even more crisp images. That must be my next bigger LightBurn project
Ps. importing my camera profile from Windows setup, worked perfectly! , no reconfiguration or fine-tuning, it just works.
Good work !!
Here is the video, with and without “Webcam Settings app”
I downloaded the paid app from Apple’s webstore and installed it normally on my 2 Macbook Pro.
It is important that “Webcam Settings” is started before LightBurn.
Also note that the settings for LightBurn’s camera that are selected with the “Webcam Settings app” remain persistent in the camera.
I am still in the process of creating some profiles that make it very easy to adapt the camera to different conditions.
Billie, have you received any comments from the developers, what they think of this app’s capabilities and whether they will consider implementing at least the exposure option into LightBurn for Mac OS. I can’t imagine that the Chinese have got a special agreement/permission with and from Apple or are more skilled in programming than “our” people.
I’m not a Mac user nor a developer, but it looks like there are APIs available for camera settings in Swift and Objective-C:
Maybe Lightburn’s limitations in this regard are in the cross-platform development system used. If this is the case, it should be possible to develop a small native MacOS utility for basic camera settings, and Lightburn could call it in a “transparent” way to allow the proper user interaction.
Thanks for your reply. What you write matches up nicely with what I experience with the camera app I wrote about.
I assume that it is a priority issue from the LB side to take care of the matter and add this camera adjustment option for Mac OS. They have a lot of iron in the forge right now, with all the new laser types they are trying to implement and not forgetting Mill Mage which definitely takes a fair share of the resources.
But I definitely expect that Mac users of LightBurn will be on par with Windows users at some point.
I may have to try using a camera again. I initially bought a cheapo thing from Aliexpress, which was very poor, so instead bought a proper Lightburn one. The result was disappointing - poor fuzzy image quality made precise work placement little better than guesswork and despite fiddling around for a long time I never found a way of improving things. I installed a red dot pointer which is much simpler and more accurate than my attempts with the camera setup.
