Mark 5k Registration Made Easy

Mark 5k registration

hey folks so i was asked if i could cut a decoration for a kid's room uh more specifically i was asked if i could cut this file um out of a piece of wood that is about three feet long three feet by one foot now my machine is not this large and so this project is too big to fit on the bed of my machine and cut in one piece so i thought this would be a great project to show you a couple of newer features in light burn that can make it easier for you to cut up projects and execute things that are larger than your laser bed so there are a couple of parts to this the first part is going to be taking this file and cutting it into the multiple sections needed so that each section is small enough to fit on your laser and then the next part is aligning those sections so that you can make this look like it was all cut in one piece and so to do the cutting we're going to use a new tool in light burn called cut shapes and the cut shapes tool acts remarkably like a cookie cutter and so what i mean by that is you have a shape like this that is your cutter you have a shape like this that is the thing you want cut and similar to the boolean tools you select both you go tools cut shapes and it doesn't look like it did anything but light burn has actually broken this out into two pieces one which is everything that was outside of the cutter and one that is everything that was inside the cutter and so if i was to make three squares each one basically a panel that i want i can use those squares to cut the project up into the pieces that are small enough that will fit on my machine the next part of this is going to be aligning the different cuts so that they come out correctly and for that we're going to use the print and cut feature in light burn which lets you register a cut to a set of registration marks and so in order to make this all work we're going to put some registration marks in this project and when we cut out one section it will emit a couple of registration marks along with it and then we'll use those to line up the next section with the previous one and we'll show how all of that ties together as we do this so let's get going now the artwork that i have right now is set to fill however because this is going to be a cut out i'm going to change it to line i just had it in fill mode so that you could see how things looked this is not the scale that we need yet we actually need a template here just as a starting point so i'm going to create a rectangle and type three feet by one foot and so that is the ultimate size that this is going to be i'm going to select my mermaid i'm going to select my wood template and hit align centers to move this into the middle deselect everything select just the mermaid and then hold the control key as i drag this so that it drags from the center and scale it to be roughly the size that i'm going to want when i'm done here so i want a little bit of room on either side so that i have some room to make mistakes but overall this looks about right i think the sizing here is basically correct this is what i want so now we have to cut this into three different sections you'll notice i'm going to group this quickly using the greater than and less than keys i can rotate 90 degrees in either direction so my machine has passed through doors on the front and rear if you had a machine with pass-through doors on the side you could do this in two sections just halves like this mine has them in front and back and with my laser bed i don't have enough space to cut this in halves i'm going to have to actually do it in three sections so the tail the middle and then the head so to do that let me ungroup this again i need three cutting boxes effectively one for the tail section one for the midsection one for the head technically you don't need to do them all you can do every other one and i'll show you what i mean by that so i'm just going to break this into three sections that are each one foot by one foot so again we're going to create a box i'm going to type one foot by one foot um i have the aspect lock turned off um if i did not have the aspect lock turned off um it would scale this box to be locked when i scaled it and i'll show you what i mean by that if you dragged something out that was not the correct shape and you have the aspect lock turned on if i type three feet here it will make this the same shape with the new scale that i want that i chose and that's obviously not correct um i want one foot by one foot like that so i've just created two little boxes i'm going to make these a different color so we'll make our cutters red just because now i'm going to line these up so that one of these boxes is at the front end here and one of them is at the back end here and to do that i'm going to click this corner of this box and you'll see that my cursor changes shape to a crosshair that's telling me that it's snapping to that corner node so when i grab it i'm now dragging from that exact corner and if i get near something else lightburn will snap it to that thing so in this case i'm dragging it near this other corner of this large template rectangle i have and so lightburn has snapped the cutting shape to match and i'm going to do the other one from the other corner so that i can snap it to here so grabbing here drag to there so now i have my rough layout and then i've got a cutting shape on this end and a cutting shape on this end and then whatever's left is in the middle um i'm also going to create registration marks and so what i mean by that is we need a way for the print and cut feature to have something for me to line it up with print and cut just lets you specify a target shape so i can draw pretty much anything it could be a circle like this you just need something that you have a center point that you can align your red dot pointer up with and now a circle doesn't have a center point that's visible so what we're going to do instead is make one i'm going to make one a little smaller first of all we'll just make these 10 millimeters i'm going to draw a line now again using the snaps when i get to this top edge or side edge a circle is actually four arcs that start at the north east south and west points and so i can draw a straight line from the top to the bottom and then i can draw a straight line from the left to the right and they're nice and horizontal and they make a nice perfect little cross select the whole thing and group it uh normally i use ctrl g to group but this is the button for it now we want these cross hairs to be a different color again i'm going to make them green and i'm going to drag this to this snapping point here so that it's right on that corner and then i'm just going to use my cursor arrow to move it down by one step so that it's just in from the wood because we actually do have to engrave this on the material that we're cutting so we can see it so i'm going to copy that shape and paste one down here and snap it to that corner move it up paste one over here snap it to that corner and move it up paste one up here snap it here move it down so now i have marks on each of these corners here basically where my cuts are going to get split so the way that the print and cut feature works you create registration marks like this either on something that you are printing or something that you are sending to your laser and then you use those same marks later to register a different thing or a different cut to these marks so what we're going to do is run this part of the job here on the laser and send these marks with it so they get drawn by the laser wherever they end up then when we do the next section this middle section here we're going to use those two marks that got emitted with the previous section and tell this section to use these to line them up with it sounds a lot more complicated than it is and when you actually see it in practice it's quite simple to do so don't panic yet we have to cut up our project so to do that we're going to use these red shapes that we used or we created to be our cutters so the first thing we do is select the mermaid then we select the cutting tool we go to tools cut shapes and it's done again it doesn't look like it did anything but it actually has segmented the job and you can see we have this little pokey bit sticking out here this here has split everything off into its own group and i can move this just using the cursor keys and it lines up perfectly so that when it's not selected you can't actually tell that it's done anything and then the rest of the project is over here in this second piece so now we have to repeat the process to cut this section off so again i'm going to select the mermaid i'm going to select my cutting tool go to tools cut shapes and now i have the next piece so there's the head there's the mid section and here's the tail so we have our project now cut into three sections and we have these small registration marks created for it so this is pretty much ready to go the things we're going to have to be careful of are getting this lined up on the machine properly getting these marks sent correctly and so on so what i'm going to do is break this into three distinct files so that i don't make a mistake basically when i'm sending it first of all uh pressing the greater than key rotate it 90 degrees so that this is now vertical which is the way my machine needs it i'm going to feed it through from the tail uh then the midsection then the head so i'm going to do the tail as the first part of the project um i'm going to save this as mermaid so we're going to call this one page 1. um i'm going to do it again for page two and then i'm going to do it again for page three now i'm going to go back and edit these so that the individual pages are correct i also haven't set up my power and speeds correctly yet we're going to have to do that as well and it would have been easier if i did that to begin with i'll go back and clean that up so the first file is going to be the tail section and so for that we're going to delete everything except these so i'm going gonna save this as page one so this tail is going to get cut and it's going to send these two engraving crosshairs with it now these are just set to line i've got these set to fairly high speed fairly low power this is the cut the tail cutout itself and this has relatively high speed with lots of power i'm actually going to need to change this so we'll do this at say 15 millimeters a second 80 power that's probably accurate for my system um and then the line cuts just to do the engraving marks those are fine as they are now you could and you probably would want to save out a template to show you where the wood should go so what i'm likely to want to do is remove all of these other parts and then just pull this up a little bit so we're still on page one here um i will save this so this now is a piece or an outline that i can use to show me where the wood should go so when i load my sheet into the machine if i frame it's going to show me this exact outline and that's going to help me line up the wood for the first cut before i start feeding the others through it's important to get this lined up well enough so that you have room if you kind of go off a little bit while you're doing your cuts the print and cut alignment is going to make sure that the cut itself is aligned but if i had the wood arranged funny to begin with so for example if my wood was placed into the machine like this it wouldn't be lined up correctly as i fed the project through it would you know go off the side if that would and so that would be bad by including a little template like this at least for the first cutting file i have a good idea of where the wood needs to go or land on the machine bed to line this all up so i'm not going to engrave this at full power i'm actually not going to engrave it at all um we'll set this to be 100 speed and say 3 percent power just so that it basically does nothing and we'll save that so i'm going to open up the next page of the mermaid file which is this one and move everything up by one section now for this part i do not need the tail i do not need the body i also do not need that i only need the middle section that i'm going to be cutting and i need to make sure that this is set at the same speed and power that i had in the other layers or in the other files pardon me so 15 and 80 and we'll set min power to be 30 for no particular reason and the crosshairs are fine now we have cross hairs in the other file that are here and here these ones are going to engrave as well that's fine they should just engrave right over top of the other ones these ones are the important ones these are going to be new for this file so when we run this on the machine it's going to engrave this mark and this mark over the ones that we already have that were part of the other or the first part of the job and then it's going to engrave these ones new so that we can line up the next part of the job and then obviously it's going to run the rest of the cut as well so we'll save this and then we'll open up the third page of our project and this is the final step position that about there now for this one we don't need anything but the head and then these two marks which we're going to align to um so again these two marks will have been output already by the previous stage by the previous file and we're using the presence of these two to line up this next piece of the cut and we'll show how that works in a moment when we actually do the cutting so i'm going to go back and just quickly spot check everything that i've done so far and then we'll head over to the machine and start cutting so the first section of this is pretty easy now i have loaded the file into the machine it's in my controller i've placed the wood just to give you an idea of where it's going to go if i hit the frame button either in lightroom or on the machine it does this follows the path in my wood and so that is framed fairly well so we're going to run this first cut and then we'll show how to do the registration with the second half while we're using the pass-through while this is engraving you can see the two registration marks have already been put down it's running through the cuts can't tell yet if it's actually going through or not this is wood that i have not cut before so i may have to go back over this and do it a second time not a big deal so after running a quick second pass everything has properly cut out and you can see that my two registration marks one here and one here are quite visible i've got my pass-through door open so let's do the fun part aligning the next part of the file with this one so first thing you do is pick this up carefully and feed it in now i'm going to do this in a way that hopefully makes my life just a little bit easier i'm going to manually line up my red dot pointer with the first mark as just how i'm placing the wood now you don't have to do this there's no requirement that you do this but it makes it a little bit quicker if you do it like this so this is the important part we're going to point the red dot and you can see it there glowing in the middle at this cross hair we're going to select this same crosshair in the project in light burn and tell light burn to align where the machine is right now with where that red dot or where that cross hair is in the project and then we're going to go over to this one and do the same thing we'll jog the laser over to this point here and we'll tell lightburn this is the second crosshair while having that second crosshair selected in the project and in that way light burn will be able to align the next part so that it connects perfectly here so we'll go to the machine i'll show you how to align this target in lightburn we'll do that next so i've loaded the next part of this project um this and this are the two or this this marker up here and this one over here are the two markers that were output by the previous section of the project so if you remember the tail of the mermaid is up here somewhere and there were two crosshair marks that were output with that job so the one that i currently have the laser pointed at is this one and so in order to tell light burn how to align this part of the job with the previous part we select this crosshair we go to tools print and cut and we say set first target position now when you select this light burn reads the current position of the laser head and it looks at the position of what you have selected and it records both and so when i say print and cut set first target position nothing really seems to have happened if i go back and look at that menu you can see that this first option here is now highlight there's a little blue square so it's telling me that that first marker position is now valid so now we have to line up the second target so on the laser itself i jog the red dot pointer to point at the second target marker this one as accurately as i can point the red dot pointer right at the dead center of this crosshair i go to tools print and cut set second target position and when i click this you'll notice that light burn now says print and cut here in the in the laser window and if i go up to the tools menu and i open up the print and cut menu you can see the first second and third entries all have a little blue highlight next to them so that's telling me that my first target position is valid my second target position is valid and it's aligning the output to the targets now it enabled this automatically for me as long as you have valid targets you can align your output to those targets if i want to turn the print and cut feature off i just click this entry again and it goes away over here i haven't changed my target markers yet so i can go back here and turn this back on without any problem i could also if my alignment wasn't correct or it framed wrong or something go back and reselect my targets and redo the process but effectively by selecting this marker and this marker with the laser pointed at each of them and using the print and cut feature light burn has figured out exactly where to position the output on the laser so that this cut will now line up with the one before it and so i'm going to send this file to the laser and we'll run it so this is still lined up with the previous target marker right there that's the original one the first one that we did i've loaded the file into the laser so when i hit frame it should frame just on the outside of that marker and that marker and then the two that are going to go at the bottom here it's not going to frame the mermaid exactly because there are four target markers that you can see in the corners of the job so one up there one down there one down there and so on but the frame should go on the outside of this mark and this mark at the very least so when we frame you'll see that happen that looks good so i'm going to close the lid and run the job all right so we're at the first kind of critical part of this where you can see that line right up there has actually met the other part of the tail that was sent already so if we move over here a little bit you can see that it has lined up properly with the part that was already cut and it'll continue to do that so we'll come back to this as it finishes the job now if we zoom in a little bit you can actually see a couple of spots there's one about there and one about it's difficult for me to point my finger at the right spot while i'm holding the phone but one about there and then there's one there that are slightly dark and that's because of where the machine began firing it left a little splash of air there so you can see a little bit of char where the end points lined up but otherwise this is accurate and perfect so this is how it looks with the second half done you can see again we've got our next set of target marks output on either side of the job here these will be connected to the next piece when it does the next the final third but the critical bit is up here by the tail where right about there is the connection mark between the two jobs so you can see a tiny little burn there one there uh and one there and that one's actually almost imperceptible but these two are a little more visible but those are where the two parts of the job were connected together and it's just um air assist splash or a little bit of smoke from the beginning of the cut but you can see the alignment is perfect it's it looks like it's one continuous piece so now we're going to take the wood slide it through do the same registration procedure for the next part using these two target markers to line up the third part of the job and we'll uh see what the final output looks like shortly all right so i'm sliding the wood up here getting it into position for the next cut but i thought i would show just to prove that this isn't some strange trickery that i'm doing i'm going to arrange the wood in the machine like this so you remember that the first two parts were very very straight like that they were lined up nice and straight in the machine so for the last piece i'm going to show you just how off you can be and twist it like that and so i am going to jog my laser over to this first mark you really want to slow it down when you get close so you can either use light burn itself with the jog arrows to adjust in very very very small increments i usually move 0.1 millimeters at a time to line up my target markers or on your rueta control panel or whatever controller you're using if you have one with a speed button you can adjust the speed of movement down uh to the point where it's just crawling so i've set this to one millimeter per second and now i can jog very very very slowly so you want the laser to be pointed at that center mark as accurately as you possibly can so here i've loaded the third and final file i've also put these two markers on their own layer and set them to one percent power output because i don't actually want these ones to burn i don't need them to i just need the markers so that i can tag them so again select this first marker go to tools print and cut set first target position to line it up with the selected marker on the laser then i jog the laser over to point at this second marker on the bed select it go to tools print and cut set second target position so now the second position target is set and so even though this job is arranged nice and vertical here and it's really really slanted and rotated on the laser you'll see that the output is registered correctly because we've used these two target markers to line everything up so i'm going to send this file and run it on the laser and we'll see what the finished product looks like so i've sent the job to the machine and as a quick check you can actually see in the file preview that it shows you on the display that those two marks that one and that one are in approximately the same orientation as they are on the bed of the machine so that's a good sign you can tell that lightburn has actually angled the job properly so that everything should line up so i'm going to turn everything on and run this and we'll see how it looks you can see pretty much immediately the first part of the job being sent has already connected to and is lined up with part of it that was already sent out and that part just dropped so it's perfectly lined up with what was sent before you can see this piece is yet another uh that was sectioned in parts with between this file and the previous file and again the cuts are nicely lined up so this was a happy little accident not really happy but an accident nonetheless um while running the second pass i had a piece i think this piece right here fall into the knife bed a little bit and poke out so when this one was cut it hopped back over to hit another cut it caught this and pulled the machine with it i think it was actually going to cut this this shape here but bumped up against the piece of this that was stuck up and pulled the wood off to one side misaligning all of the subsequent cuts that would follow it so i went back to the computer um realigned the print and cut markers again with the position of the wood as it is now and we're going to run the job one last time just to show you that even if you horribly screw up like i just did you can probably salvage it using target marks and print and cut to align the output so we'll close the lid here set everything up and hit go so remember this wood is slid about half an inch out of position from where it was when i did this last run and yet you can see the beam grazing the insides of the edges that are already there as it goes around so this is another example of how accurate the print and cut feature is uh you're able to make a second pass over an existing project after you've moved it as long as you can line everything up all right so the job is finished and if you look we now have one large continuous piece with no visible seam here except for a couple of very very minor little discolorations from the exhaust um there are where is it on this end there were a couple of spots there if you look really closely there you can see just a tiny little indent right there and that's basically because i ran this three times and so the beam width got a little wider there but it was only because i screwed up uh having it catch that piece and pull the job out of alignment that was even necessary normally you would not be able to see those at all um there's another one right there but they're basically invisible um and you may have depending on the size of your laser and your exhaust and air assist and so on you may have visible marks at the start and end of every cut so this is not an unexpected result but there's the finished product and it's all one piece and it's quite a bit larger than i could put in my laser by itself