For all those who are looking for a way to use Lightburn for their CNC Mill to drive a second laser unit, I wrote a G-Code Converter. All you have to do is to use the machine profile “CanCam” in Lightburn and export your G-Code. The main issue with Lightburn G-Code is that the laser intensity is not defined in the G-Code. This is added by the converter to suitable G-Code for CNC Mills.
IMHO… all of these machining operations, additive or subtractive, depend on the proper ‘speeds and feeds’ to operate properly. We commonly think of milling machines or lathes, but a 3d printer has a set of usable speeds and feeds for it to operate.
Speeds have generally referenced the spindle, but the laser power can also derived. My little cnc machine used spindle speeds gcode to set the laser pwm… in reality the same pwm drove both.
I built a CanCam device profile and looked at S in Device settings. S=1 for CanCam, so I can see that your reasoning is that Smax is 1 for on and 0 for off.
Other grbl flavors use Smax=255 or Smax=1000 and LightBurn gladly manages the variable laser/spindle power requests.
Please create a plain GRBL device profile for use on your project and your laser equipped mill. Please report back with troubleshooting questions if it’s not working.
