Best settings every burn-lightburn power grid

all right guys welcome back to the shack tonight we're going to be covering a topic that a lot of people ask about uh it affects everybody that has a laser and there's really no substitution for this process when it comes to making sure that you have the right power and the right speed every time and that is power testing charts uh Power grids test grids whatever you want to call it uh but the whole basic principle is is it runs different speeds and different powers and you do this on every different medium that you use and then you just kind of go through here and select the look that you're going for and that's your settings so there's a very critical part of using a laser engraver and having good results that are consistent Time After Time After Time so if that's something you're interested in stick around we're going to get back we're going to discuss the importance of it and then I'm going to show you how using the light burn tool you can create your own power grids powered charts however you want to call it and you can save those guys to your computer and anytime you get a new material you can load that thing run the test and you can confidently move forward knowing that the result that you get is going to be the result that you wanted foreign [Music] recently I had a customer that wanted to start ordering cutting boards from me these are bamboo cutting boards I had had some terrible experiences with bamboo in the past because people would bring me things that I'd only had one of and I didn't get the opportunity to do this and so I had to guess at the settings now although you can do that I recommend anytime you can order extra blank or you know if you mess up on something and it's got scrapped anyway turn it into a test piece guys it'll save you in the long run it'll save you money it'll save you time and it just makes life a lot better and a lot easier so this is the general principle of what we're talking about and you can see in this one that you have a a lighter burn down to the darker burn and that's because the power and the speed gradually get faster and higher from this point out your speed goes up this way or your power goes up this way speed goes up that way and that results in the different shades now that's really really something that you're going to want to pay attention to when you're trying to do an engrave and you want to have shading if you're doing a you know an engraved that has two different layers that you're going to run at two different power settings to try to contrast them you would want to know what power settings to use to be able to get good contrast if you wanted a really dark and then you wanted a not so dark then you just pick those out and use those settings and you would have confidence in knowing outside of the fact that wood bamboo any type of natural medium is going to have some variations so it's it's not an exact science when you're dealing with things like bamboo wood and so forth if you're looking at more of the you know metals or acrylics man-made materials you'll have a little more consistency with the power and speed settings because you don't have that you know tighter grain or looser grain or harder wood or softer wood all in the same work piece it's going to be a lot more consistent so you'll have better results so do keep that in mind natural materials are going to have variations and there's nothing you can do to fix that so one thing that I will say is substances like this little glass pane that I've got here uh this stuff is painted it's like an oyster glass tile type thing for backsplashes and I did a test grid on it but the purpose that I did it before was to come in from the front here I wanted to be able to see what it would look like from the front and I've got another one of these that I'm going to try to do an engrave on but I wanted to figure out what settings would give me the desired effect and as you can see all these different grids that I did I've got varying effects on the glass on that side so that's why it's important because if your settings are off you may get right the opposite look as what you were shooting for so that's something that you're going to want to consider anytime you're getting into a new medium oh so and these are just a few of the samples that I have I just ran around the shop and picked up the ones that I keep for future reference and like I said this this little tile is not not really cheap so I didn't want to throw this away so I just filed it away with my power uh settings and that way I can go back and reference it when I'm trying to if I wanted the frosting or if I wanted the black or if I wanted the painted on look you know I would know where to go so acrylic that's another one uh if you're trying to get that white look on black acrylic you know you're going to want to figure out what power settings and what speed settings work best uh as you can see depending on the power and speed some of it's a little wider than other some of it's a little blacker than other now I will tell you with acrylic you're going to want to run air assist I have a lot better luck getting white lettering on black acrylic running air assist if you don't run air assist it pretty much just scratches it and it doesn't make it turn white like that I'll learn that one the hard way guys so if you're trying to get color on acrylic I would definitely turn up the air assist sometimes the more air assist you run the wider the less air assist the darker and sometimes just right the opposite so you're going to want to do the test on this but not only do it this way but you're also going to want to change the air assist settings as you do them to determine which look you like best because it's not a matter of if you can engrave it it's how to get that look that you like so MDF you know uh that's x2d1 I got a comgrow right there okay MDF mine port uh somebody forgot to write it on this one but you get the picture guys each machine is going to interact differently with each medium each medium is going to interact differently with each machine so whether it's a different medium or a different machine you're going to want to rerun those tests to get the best results now I'm not saying you got to do it every time you can have some outstanding results I get lucky sometimes and just plug something in there and it it works it works great but then there's other times that I do it and you end up having to redo it or start over or wasting a blank so those are the times that you're trying to avoid so I'm going to move over to light burn and we're going to do the basic principles I'm just gonna this video is gonna be all about the power grid settings how to set that up how to save it how to import those and that's pretty much going to be the video so here we go let's get over to the computer all right guys welcome to the computer and today I'm going to go over basic all we're going to be concentrating on today is going to be this guy right here uh and you would go into lot burn go under laser tools and it's going to be the material test uh this is probably one of the most helpful most useful functions that you will find in light burn it'll save you a lot of material and a lot of Heartache from damaged or improperly completed projects now just to give you an idea of the layout of the land here I'm going to start at the top and just kind of work my way over and down and for those of you that have used this before I apologize but the audience intended audience for this or those guys who don't know about this and haven't used it so I'm going to try to make sure that I can cover it as thoroughly as possible so this is the presets guys and if you don't have any already made up you're probably not going to have anything in here uh I have several that I have created and I have got these created for specific purposes and because I do a lot of side by side comparison I want to make sure that I'm using the same settings for these tests on different machines and so that's why I have so many different variations uh well I'll show you in a minute how to create one of those from scratch and this is a save delete and then this is your export preset and import presets and yes guys you can share these uh you can export that and then if you have another machine that's on your network uh you can drop that into a folder and you can share it between machines that's typically what I use it for uh I don't send these many places all right down here these are actually your settings these this here actually pertains to the layout of the grid itself this is more or less just your file management tab here so the standard the way that these things come uh the way light burn sets them up is going to be a 10 by 10 and I'm going to show you what that looks like with the preview button here uh so you're going to have 10 across and 10 up that's just the standard interval test or power test that you know they're going to load when you go in here okay you've got the traversal modes you're not you're not really going to care about that the biggest part of this that you're going to care to see is going to be how you lay this out all right you can do these uh I have some that are five by fives uh see this 50 50 and up that's a 10 by 10. let's see I've got some five by fives in here somewhere where is it at um there's a six by six I've got that one set up for six by six this is my tumbler speed test uh and I start my power out at 70 and go up to a hundred I start the speed at 50 and go up to 150 and with that little Quick Test right there typically I can get a good setting for getting nice clean tumblers without any overburn or without any Leaf being left behind so you can customize these things to however you want to I even have that's a five by five that's a 30 watt glass test that I set up um so you can set them up however you feel all right this is going to be your vertical Rose and you can add these like I said you can put I mean you can do a 50 by 50 if you want if I can get my numbers to work here all right number pads not working give me just a second guys there we go ah let's just do it this way okay maybe you can't do 50. you can do 10. all right maybe there is a limit 20 let's see 30. 40. okay we're gonna go to 50. let me do 49. no uh 45 maybe no looks like 40 maybe the limit guys I lied okay so 40 apparently it will not take anything by the value of 40. so move over here we'll do another one with 40. now this is going to be a really intense power grid but there it is guys so you can make these things really absurdly large if you want to or you can make them really small you can go and just do a two by two you can customize these to however you see fit um two by two is not going to do you a lot of good but you know it'd be quick so that's how you set the columns uh this parameter you can actually change those I don't really know why you would want to unless you wanted to set the interval or the passes to change but with a speeding power we're going to just study those today speed and power this column is going to be your speed so you're going to set the minimum speed uh anytime your uh let's say if you're trying to engrave you want to make sure it's an engraved realistic speed you don't want to go too slow especially in engraved mode because you will start a fire uh if you set your if you set it to to feel and you set this at like 10 millimeters per second and you turn the power up to 100 percent you're good likelihood of starting a fire so be mindful that this needs to be semi-realistic it doesn't have to be exact uh but you don't want to be running five millimeters per second engrave at 100 output that's not going to work out well this is your maximum uh speed so if you know at a certain speed your machine pretty much quits riding uh because it's moving too fast you're going to want to stay below that uh typically I leave my back set to 100 150 200 depending on how light I want to go with this and can considering how many boxes I have created typically if you do a eight by eight if you're if you're just totally unaware of what your setting should be you could do a eight by eight and if you were doing engraving you could do 50 to 100 and then on your power uh you could go I would probably do 50 to 100 here and that would kind of give you a good like wide range of power settings wide range of speed that would get you close to the results that you want now let's say you ran this test and it came back and you could tell that somewhere in here is where you you want to be then you create another test but you change the parameters to use this as your minimum and maximum and this is your minimum and Max minimum and maximum and then you run that test again and you can keep doing that and and go deeper and deeper until it gets to the point to where there's no change between these boxes and you know but but if you do the the smaller ones like this this is going to be like an eight minute burn so if like I said if you don't find one that you like but you can tell it's somewhere within these four or five boxes or eight boxes here then you can take those uh settings use those as your minimum and maximum use this same size grid so it only takes you a few minutes to run it and run it again and get a little bit more variety uh and maybe even find that that exact color that you're going for so when you're setting this thing up these are all basically they're going to be you're going to leave these alone unless you want to do it you know bigger boxes which is just going to make it take longer I've had good luck with the five millimeter by five millimeter boxes oh this is where in the workspace this uh test grid is going to burn there are times especially when I'm running multiple test grids and I don't want to move my material that I will go ahead and custom insert the location here uh and that is going to be where you want the center of this test grid so you could adjust those you know if you had a 400 by 400 workspace like you could set this one to 150 and then set this one to you know 225 or whatever to try to space them out to keep it from being on top of each other and you can just move them around uh if you don't know exactly where you want to put them you can always measure over and down and do it that way but for the most part it's always going to be in the center of your workspace unless you change those numbers uh these settings here are very very necessary make sure when you're setting these up if you want to do a feel this is going to be your your editor this setting here the material setting is going to be what is used to create this okay so if you've got this on feel it's going to do an engrave or field test if you've got it online it's going to do a line or cut depending on the speed oh you can also go in here and change your LPI you can turn you know bi-directional off you can change your over scan I mean you can you can turn on flood feel you can test all of those different uh things in this entire test grid by changing them here so this is going to be what dictates each one of those little boxes that is created in this test grid so whatever those settings are is going to apply to all of these boxes right here all right now this one's sometimes overlooked and I overlook it at times two guys uh this is going to be the speed and power setting for the text that is around the uh test grid that's going to be the power and speed settings for this text right here so if that is way too high or if that is set to a line and set to go really slow it's actually going to cut those letters out so you're going to want to make sure that it doesn't have to be the perfect setting because if you knew the perfect set and you wouldn't be doing this but it does need to be close enough to be legible and not start a fire so those are two requirements try to make it at least legible and at least don't start a fire with it so if you have absolutely no idea what to run here uh 50 and 50 would probably be a safe bet 100 and 100 would probably be a safe bet but do not run this like 10 millimeters a second you know set to line because it's it's you know it's going to basically try to cut your material in half so this is where you're going to start with your best guess uh if you typically cut wood at a specific setting with your machine and you have good results then drop that in here it may be too dark or it may not be dark enough but as long as it's legible that it does is start a fire it's it's a win and then the next time you run this material you'll know exactly what to put in here by referencing the test grid so I'm going to go in here and I'm going to create a new test grid and just show you the steps so we're going to leave this one at eight by eight I'm going to set the the minimum the 50 100 50 100 this is going to be a very basic grid uh and so once you get all of these things put in here then if you want to save this before you run it I would recommend you just hit the save button and then you can name this and I'm going to name it eight by eight and just hit OK now that is saved so when you go to exit if you close and you you can exit completely out of light burn we'll exit completely out of light burn here open the light burn back up that power grid and this is a totally different machine too this is actually it defaulted back to my Acer so if I go in here and I go to a material test I'm on a different machine but I can go back in here and there's the 8x8 that is the one that we just created just a few minutes ago and I can now run that on this same machine using those same settings on that material or any other material and be able to check the results if you want to delete one while it is selected in this preset box right here just hit the delete and it's going to ask you are you sure you want to delete preset eight by eight and just say yes so as you can see guys I'm a big believer in these things uh I've got I've got all kinds of tests and yes I have one for clothing because I have engraved blue jeans before and I needed to you know I need a good reference because you don't want to ruin a good pair of pants trying to engrave them and have the wrong setting and burn a hole through so I've got one set up for clothing and I can go in here and you can see the speeds 50 to 75 percent power output 150 to 200 on the speed and that was what I run on Blue Jean or denim material to get figure out where that little white engraved look comes from without damaging the material so you can save those and if and if it doesn't work before you exit out of it you can actually make changes in here and save it and then next time you pull it up you know it'll already be here I've got you know canvas test got that guy now this is a big one it's a 20 by 20 because there's a lot of when you're doing canvas and you're doing painted layers and you've got three or four different layers of paint there's there's a lot of variables and a lot of different colors that could show up if this was like a triple triple coat of paint on a canvas that's why I have these varying speeds because if you know if you've got a red canvas with yellow with a red layer a yellow layer and a Green Layer you will actually see the green yellow and red up here at different locations in here based on the power and speed settings so it's a very powerful little tool I'm really thankful that he included it with light burn and that's one reason why I like light burn it has a tool for pretty much everything uh then I've got one for metal and you can see that this guy right here uh you're running from 80 to 100 power 5 up to 50 and that was just basically trying to Mark stainless steel or some type of metal to see what kind of uh results I can get and and you can save these these will be here from now on as long as you uh don't delete the folder that they're saved in on your computer which is inside light burn and you can reference them anytime you need to so you can also save the G-Code and Export them to say a TF card and put in your machine if you want but I have not had really good luck with consistency and you know the the files being the way that I wanted them to when I got them on the machine so I don't usually use that but if you want to play around with that it is that option is in here but two big things to remember guys uh this is your Tech setting okay this is going to be the text so always make sure that you're at least not going to create a hazard uh burning your text because this is going to run if you put this at five millimeters a second 100 output it's going to try to cut that text on that setting the whole time this is your material setting this is where you got to change the number of passes the LPI any of the advanced settings that you want to put on here uh bi-directional fill over scanning all of that is changed here uh fill in shapes individually all at once it's it's all right here so those that's pretty much it guys there's really nothing else to know about this other than it is probably the most useful tool in live bird so I hope that helps but that's going to be it for tonight guys so if you haven't go ahead hit that thumbs up subscribe uh share you know help spread the word uh anything that you want to see done here at the clock Shack let me know when I've got time when I don't have jobs piled up or machines to check out I enjoy getting out here and doing these videos that are basically the reason I started my channel was to help people and so that's what I like and I like doing so if you have any ideas for Content feel free to shoot them my way if it's something I can do I'll try to work it in and get that out for you as soon as possible so until next time guys be safe and have a good day

Channel: The Clack Shack

Views: 39,273

Keywords: diy, xtool d1 10 watt, xtool laser engraver, woodmizer lx25, woodmizer, woodworking, laser cutting, laser engraving, how to, diy home decor, ortur LM3, Comgow laser engraver, Lightburn tutorial, lightburn tips, Atomstack laser, Monport CO2, Atezr P20, Atomstack, lightburn power test, laser power grid, laser power test, best laser settings

Id: 8FGEEacHYkQ

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2023