Workflow question: Linked DXF files

[Henning (Henning Klaveness)]

I am currently working on a drone prototype project with ~350 laser cut components, ~150 of which are unique. Manually creating cutting layouts from the DXF files exported from Fusion 360 is a fairly substantial task, especially with the insertion of part number text. Doing this every time we make cascading design changes (such as adapting to varying material thickness) has become a severe workflow impediment, which leads to my question:

Is there a way of building a layout with linked DXF files in Lightburn, so that it updates when the source files are overwritten? If so, I haven’t been able to figure it out. If not, is there a different path to the same solution? Inkscape is supposed to be able to do this, but there are compatibility issues with the files generated by Fusion.

[Marcus_Wakefield]

Like AutoCAD XREF’s? I’m not aware of a way of doing this. I have thought this would be a good feature to add to LightBurn for a while now but I’ve not added it to the ‘feature requests’ forum yet.

[RalphU (RU)]

This might help https://nucarve.com/

[Marcus_Wakefield]

Yes, I’d forgotten about that. I was quite excited when it was announced on the forum recently but I’ve not managed to get it to work yet. I’m sure I must be doing something wrong as it fails with an error when I try to post. I’ve not had the time to investigate why yet.