Lightburn for Galvo / Fiber on its way

No doubt many of you will have heard that Lightburn will be adding fiber / Galvo support to its software during 2022. I've been lucky enough to be beta testing it over the last week or so.

There's still a lot of features the developers are to add, but they are rolling out new versions with bug fixes and additional features around once a week.

For general laser work it performs great, the rotary is very simple to set up and all the usual Lightburn features are available.

This software once it's fully available will be a game changer for Fiber users, just as it was for the CO2 market.

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Originally Posted by Julian Ashcroft

No doubt many of you will have heard that Lightburn will be adding fiber / Galvo support to its software during 2022. I've been lucky enough to be beta testing it over the last week or so.

There's still a lot of features the developers are to add, but they are rolling out new versions with bug fixes and additional features around once a week.

For general laser work it performs great, the rotary is very simple to set up and all the usual Lightburn features are available.

This software once it's fully available will be a game changer for Fiber users, just as it was for the CO2 market.

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For sure. LightBurn is one of the best investments I've made. I no longer have a machine that works directly with LightBurn, but tend to do a lot of my prep and design work in LightBurn then transfer to CorelDraw to print to my Epilog machine. It just works and is so user friendly. A game changer for sure!

so, does it work WITH EzCad, or IN PLACE OF EzCad? I've used EzCad for so long I'm used to it and have no problem with it as to it's basic operations. However, I'm about sick and tired of the memory backlogs or whatever causes the sometimes 20 to 30 second delay for the 'marking' procedure to end after the actual marking is finished. Could be the computer but ALL my machines do this to some extent. Can't start the next part until the 'marking' dialog finally quits.

Another upgrade I'd like, is to remove the 3-hatch limitation. I have routines for engraving rifle barrels that include 7 different colors and engraving settings, used for engraving from inside-out. The only way to make them work is to make duplicate copies of what to engrave, set up hatch/color routines for each one, and then superimpose them all together. Would be nice to have just ONE graphic instead of 3 or more...

It's a complete replacement for EZCAD, The only thing you might need EZCad for is when you first set up a fiber on Lightburn as it loads the config file info from EZCad into Lightburn so you don't have to manually set things up, you could then delete EZCad from your computer.

You can open multiple windows of Lightburn on the same computer. I've had two fibers and a CO2 laser all running at the same time.

Sounds good so far.
I've never more than looked at lightburn as I became good at Coreldraw before it was even thought of. I am decently good at ezcad also, having used it for over 4 years now.
But if it makes some things easier, especially the rotary, which while I use it, I really don't trust ezcad as it hangs up or fails a lot of the time with the rotary, I'll have to take a real look at it.

And while I use Coreldraw for 95% of the work with the Fiber, it would be nice to have the software connected to the fiber work as a design software if it works decently well. And I suppose it does as others have raved for the CO2 use. Which is really quite obvious when you look at RDworks, which is really an outdated POS. Ezcad can be that way, but it isn't nearly as bad, just complicated. And somewhat necessarily complicated for the fiber. Way more going on with the fiber than a CO2.

OH, Kev, it most probably IS the computer causing you the glitch. While ezcad doesn't use memory well, the speed of the computer does seem to make a BIG difference. I've an i7 earlier version that I have been using for the whole 4 plus years of my work with lasers. My 20 watt is connected to it. And I've never had a slowdown on engraving except when I'm trying to do 24 items and ezcad crashes. I was using an i5 laptop, for the 50 watt and didn't really see any slowdown at all. I just repurposed an OLD gateway desktop to the 50 watt and it is an old, (over 11 years) i3 2.93ghz with 6Mb of memory. I was running a complicated item yesterday and it took laser about 5 or 6 seconds to start the job. Longest by far anything has taken to start. So yes, speed of the CPU does make a difference to ezcad.

My problem isn't the time to start a job, it's the waiting time once the job is DONE before EzCad goes idle; until it DOES go idle I can't start another job! And there's no rhyme or reason to if or when I'll pick up the delay, doesn't really matter how complicated the job is-- the other day I was engraving an ongoing job on the 50w machine, which is driven by Vista home- the engraving process to do 2 pieces took 34 seconds, but 'idle' didn't happen until 47 seconds! The funny thing is, the timer clock stops when the engraving stops, and holds until it goes idle, then the timer adds the wait time. The extra 13 seconds really adds to the per-piece time! And, with kudos to Triumph, this problem only exists on my Ebay fibers. Kudos because, the machine originally came with 'their' EzCad- it loads with their "T" logo- and their own controller card, it wasn't a BJJCZ card-- and when I upgraded from the 2.5.2 I had to buy a new controller (a BJJ from ebay), and downloaded Triumph's version of 2.14.10. -- Not once EVER has that machine had ANY type of delay, other than a rare one-off delay.

Another weird thing is when the machine stops in the middle of a job, then picks back up a few seconds later. And yet another, is the 'blotchy' red-lighting I get, like just drawing a circle, instead of just a solid red circle being drawn, it will (sometimes) draw a circle, stop, draw, stop, etc, where it's only drawing like 3 circles per second, and draws them SLOW, about the same speed I can 'air-draw' a circle, which is ridiculously slow for a fiber!

My Vista laptop seems to be the worst- second worst is an XP SFF desktop that runs my E2 machine, but it's not as bad as the vista. My E1 machine is run by straight-from-China Hasee laptop that came with the Triumph, runs win7 ultimate. The triumph is driven by a Dell desktop win7 pro. ALL are 32bit with 4gigs ram. All run 3gig+ processors, except the Vista which is 2.15gig. Could be why it's so sluggish, for sure!

I now have 3 desktops running 64bit, two 7's and an 8.1; I really should hook the 50 up to one of them and see what happens. Probably a V8 headslap moment ;)

I can say I've not had that issue. Stop of laser and the return to control of the PC has always been immediate. milliseconds. Might be the cards. Or the computer, or just the video cards in the computer.

There are a couple of videos on topic @ Laser Everything youtube, if anyone is interested.