Hi, I am relatively new to Lightburn, but I am trying to mark a few thousand of these stainless plates. However I thought I could use the rotary axis in the X rotation to rotate a jig to hold multiple plates at once on a disc that is larger than the work area and similar to doing a large cylinder, the rotary would move each plate under the work area at a time to engrave each plate.
Is this sort of thing possible, and if so, how would I go about setting it up? I have the jig made already and really hope it is something that can be achieved?
Attached is an image of the setup how I think it could work…
What you are describing is called Rotary Indexing. Lightburn has no mechanism for controlling the rotary in this manner. The only solution I can imagine is to write the process in GCode where you control the rotary motion with distance commands.
They are in some ways, but I have been a GCoder for a really long time and probably can’t change if I wanted to. Proprietary means protection of trade secrets to them. It means I have to buy the add-ons from them and nobody else.
I bought the SF-A9 because it was not one of those other controllers. I selected the minimum option for the no hassle path. If I get an order for 10,000 pieces, then yes, I will join the elete club.
So, if you want to see someone using the Repeat Marking Tool to do a rotary tray of business cards on a galvo laser, here’s a link to about an hour and 38 minutes into a Laser Everything live stream where they’re doing just that.
(I found a lot of videos of people using rotary marking trays, but I couldn’t easily find any basic edited how to videos. The live stream will just have to do, I suppose.)
The limitation of the Repeat Marking Tool is that it’s for just that, i.e. repeat marking, but if you’re marking a few thousand plates, I imagine they’re basically the same. (It sounds like you could theoretically use the variable text function for some variability, but I haven’t played around with that.)
