How to use the Lightburn Material Test card with YOUR BASELINE SETTINGS. Full demonstration!

hey it's rich the louisiana hobby guy you know since i did the video on the universal test card i've had a lot of people that are new to engraving that just can't figure out where to get started with it so today we're going to do something a little bit different we're going to talk about the test card that you can do with any laser in light burn and we're also going i'm also going to show you how you match that to get your starting numbers which is that seems to be the biggest problem well where do i start how do i set my power and how do i set my speed well stay right there because i'm going to show you how to do this fast and easy all right so now in version 1.2 if you look up here of light burn if you have the latest version of light burn you're going to find something new up here called laser tools and in this laser tools menu here you're gonna have something called the material test and i understand that the universal test card is more for advanced users so i decided that i needed to make a basic video and show you how to use this material test now you can use the universal test card using the same principles as this but i'm just going to show you with the material test for today being that i've never covered this before so we'll click on material test and that'll open up a new window a generator in light burn and the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to click on the save button here and i'm going to call this demo so i'll say demo and say okay so now we have a category called demo and you can do any type of presets in here that you want you just save them one after the other so what we're going to do is we're going to do an engraving test over here are your rows how many rows do you want how many columns do you want so let's do a full engraving test let's do 10 rows and let's do 10 columns and let's start our engraving speed where okay so that's the question where do we start where do we start our minimum and maximum powers here's where we answer the question let's close this for now now over here i have and yours might be up here you may not even have one on your screen a tab called library if you don't have this tab you can right click on the header of any of these boxes here and then just come over to where it says library and put a check mark next to the box that says library and then it will appear on your screen if you still don't see it on your screen you can also do it from up here you can click on the word window and then come down here to where it says to where it says library right here and just put a check mark in next if there's no check mark just check it and then you'll see the the actual window appear over on this side probably up on the top in your case but you need to have a library to load in the first place now i've got uh in the shop next door i've got the comgro 10 watt loaded here and this library is going to give me all of the basic requirements for the comro so for instance right now on here i've got some five millimeter three ply plywood so i'm gonna come down here to plywood i'm gonna come down to the closest thing i got is four millimeter and we're gonna do a cut we're also going to do an engraved test as well on plywood so let's do the engrave one first and let's take a look at what the manufacturers suggested speed and power is so if i click on edit cut i'm not going to change anything i just want to see what it is and it says 5000 speed 100 power in fill mode 2.5 over scan you're not going to need that if you have a co2 you don't need any overscan it's pretty much just for diodes and a 318 lp high now that's assuming that this laser module it has a 0.08 focal spot and it does it's 0.08 by 0.08 now to confirm all of this we're going to head over to comro's website and we're going to look up the z1 10 watt right here and we're going to just come down here and look at the features we're going to come all the way down to the specs and any any manufacturer you buy from is going to have specifications they're going to have suggested cuts so here we are so here are the product parameters and in here you'll see that if we come down here to the 10 watt right over here 0.08 by 0.08 millimeters so we know that that lpi is right and then if we come down a little bit further you're going to have some reference point for your parameters now i've gone ahead and i've transferred all of these parameters into the library and i've created a clw file that light burn can use where you don't have to refer back to the chart every single time so in here you'll see that for the engraving on plywood it is s 100 is a gerbil term that means 100 percent power 5000 millimeters per minute and you can get all this information from their website from any manufacturer's website usually so let's close that and you'll see that's what we have point zero eight zero point zero eight so that's a 318 lpi dot size which is a very good one so now we know that this information is correct five thousand and one hundred and that is the recommended starting point for engraving so forgetting about this over here now you can get these libraries for most any type laser on my forum la hobbyguy.com and i'll put a link below down in the description where you can go if you're a member you have to become a member and membership is free a new category opens up to members when they log in called member only files and downloads and in there you'll find cut library for lightburn and you'll find the cut libraries for diode lasers you'll also find them for the co2 lasers match the power that you have in this case it's 10 watt and this happens to come from comgro so i've got 10 watt you're going to download that library and then you're going to come over here on your library tab and load it into light burn now i do have another video on that i'll put that video on libraries down in the description as well but for now we're just going to use the manufacturer's suggested which is 5100 okay so let's come back to the laser tools and the material test now we're going to do 10 rows the speed minimum speed we're not going to trust their recommendation of and actually let's do let's do five rows i think five rows is gonna be enough so we're gonna do five rows we're gonna start the speed at let's start it at 4 000 instead of 5 000 let's put the maximum speed up to say i don't know 7 000. so 5000 is somewhere in the in the middle there we're going to do 5 millimeter squares and we're going to do the same thing on this time on this side now the columns will do five columns and this side is going to be power the minimum power that we're going to use they're saying a hundred is the recommended so what power do you feel comfortable using do you not like using 100 power because you can set these both to the same thing if you wanted to you could set it to a hundred and a hundred let's go ahead and set it to fifty to a hundred percent power and that makes sense to me so now it will draw five by five squares that will run from four thousand to seven thousand millimeters per minute and they will run between fifty and one hundred percent power and we're all set here and then we can also i did forget to name this one demo but we've already got it set up so we'll leave it alone so let's go to preview and here's what we get so it's going to show us the whole preview here now this doesn't look right did you notice that it's in line mode that's not what we want we want to check the engraving on this so we're going to come over here to edit material setting we're going to change this from line to fill and that will be in engraving okay now you notice the line interval changed so we're going to take our lines per uh per inch actually we're going to do it up here 0.08 and that will give us 317.5 and that should be fine if we come back to the preview that is what we're looking for so this is what's going to burn onto our material and now we will get a result from four thousand forty seven fifty fifty five hundred all the way up to seven thousand speed one pass and it will be anywhere from uh fifty percent power to 100 power if i go all the way see there we go 50 62.5 75 85 and we should have a nice grid here and this will give us an idea of what to look for how dark do you want your engraving you're going to pick a black on here you do you want it really dark way down here or do you want it lighter or what shade of gray all throughout here would you prefer to run this job at and that's pretty much what this test is we're all set now we're gonna say okay to that we're ready to run this job so what we're gonna do is i'm gonna come over to the let me arrange this a little bit better i'll put this here i'll bring the camera out oh i can't bring the camera out okay because i've already got this one up so that's okay no problem uh we've got the camera over here i'll zoom in on it instead and you'll see i've got the comro set up with the 10 watt laser on it and what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna home the laser first because that's and i can't do any of that with this open okay so let's let's go ahead and save this preset as demo like that and say okay and now we're all set we've already saved that so let's close that do what i really wanted to do let's bring this out the camera out to here let's bring it up just a little bit actually looks like it's in the right place but what i want to do is i want to home it first so i'm going to click home just to make sure that we're going to be in the right spot and then i'll come over here to the map icon on the left i'll click on that icon and i'll click about where i think i want it to go and i think that's probably pretty close to where i want it and let's see what we get and that looks pretty good let me move it up just a little bit more and let me look at my current position bottom left is going to be the start from and i am now ready to bring my laser tool material test back up now we can move this out of the way go ahead and pick the preset which was demo and it looks like it did not save it oh here it is down here okay there we go so now we have our five rows our five columns our speed our power is all set and we're actually ready to run this test we're going to preview it one more time and that is exactly what we're looking for and i'm going to hit the start button and there it goes so again this is very simple to set up now this is going to take some time so what i'll do is i will put this into a fast forward and then we'll go ahead and take a look at the results and then we'll do the line test so what we're going to do today is we're going to do the engraving which is happening right now and then we're going to move to the left of that and we're going to do the actual cut test on this 5 millimeter plywood and see how that comes out so now i'm going to speed this video up let it run through this job and then we'll set up the next job all right so that engraving is all finished now and i know this can seem like it takes a long time to get through but it really doesn't it's really very quick so this time we're going to do the cut test this time so i'm going to come down here to my library and if you don't have the library and you don't want to go download it for light burn which i don't see why you wouldn't want to but just go to your manufacturer's website or on the usb stick that comes with your laser you'll find usually user instructions and in there you'll find cutting in engraving parameters but i'm gonna come down here to the seven millimeter cut and i'm gonna edit it just to look at it and i'm gonna see that the speed should be a hundred percent power and 100 millimeters per minute excuse me and 90 power okay so that is the manufacturer's suggested settings for cutting seven millimeter so we're just going to remember that 100 speed 90 power and what we're going to do let me show you how quickly this is done now we're going to come in here to the material test we're going to do uh let's do uh let's do five rows and we're going to do minimum speed we're going to go from 80 we're not going to trust her 100 we're going to maximum speed we're going to max this out at we're going to say 130 so that will give us a good range in speed and then we're going to do five rows and the power we're gonna go from let's go from uh let's go from 80 to a hundred percent power and let's do the same five by five let's do eight millimeter because we're cutting here so the five millimeters won't drop out easy i'd rather put it up a little higher eight or ten millimeters so we will make an 8 by 8 millimeter square it will run from anywhere from 80 to 130 speed it will run five rows five columns with the power of eighty to one hundred and actually we could make this you know if you only use a hundred percent for power like i do well then i would make this a hundred percent power just like that now if we preview it you'll see that that's not right because that's in field mode so we're going to edit the material settings we're going to change this to line mode and that's all we need to do one pass in line mode and we're going to say okay so now if we preview it this is what we've got 100 power we're going to run it at 80 speed 93 105 118 and 130 and actually let's change the power because this doesn't make sense we would only really need one column right so let's do five columns and let's do the minimum at um 50 yeah 50 to 100 that looks good and preview that so now we'll have 50 62.5 75 87.5 and 100 and i would only expect that it's going to cut through a few of these but anyway this is going to give us a good pattern to work with so now the next thing we need to do and i forgot we're going to uh we're going to call it demo cut like that say okay because i have to close this i always home my laser before i start any job so i'm going to go ahead and home it and then i'm going to move it to somewhere about where oh i have to click the move to the move button somewhere to about where i think we want to start this job and i'm thinking that looks pretty good let's move it up just a little bit let's move it up right about there maybe a little more to the left and that looks pretty good right there and we are in current position bottom left so it will start right there and work its way up and we are now ready to come back to the laser tools material test and let's go find that last one we just did demo cut so now we have five rows five columns and we're ready to go check a preview one more time and move this out of the way and that's how quick it is to set up and i could probably do this you know three times faster if i weren't trying to narrate my way through it so we'll just go ahead and hit the start button like that and we'll let it do its thing and again i am going to the air assist is on by the way if you're wondering and so is the smoke extraction over here so uh it's gonna get some of the smoke not all of it i should have really brought it over a lot closer but this is in the shop next door so i'm really not too too worried about it and uh we should be good to go i'll go ahead and speed this up and then we'll get into the final results do [Music] all right so we're all finished i went and got the wood off of the laser and this is what we get so here is my really crappy photograph i don't know why i can't get good photography looking it looks like it's bent over here and the the the cut you can't see the colors but anyway as far as the engraving goes i think that 75 percent 7 000 speed came out just awesome on this five millimeter baltic birch i think that's a just an awesome speed and you know what i forgot it's five millimeter we did it with the seven millimeter cut library so we could have cut it just blew through most of this look at this 50 50 power and 93 speed and it it just blew right through it so 105 speed 62 percent power so we we could have actually started our speed at the 150 mark on this which is really awesome by the way for you know a 10 watt laser now this happens to be a good laser the comro 10 watt out of all the 10 watts on the market it it is the most powerful in an actual light beam test in fact it's even uh one one watt more powerful than the x tool 10 watt which is kind of surprising now i do want to show you this is not a good representation over here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to zoom in on the camera here and i'm going to show you what this looks like this 75 75 power and seven thousand look at the beautiful color that it got there the color is just awesome on this particular wood and this is what these test cards are used for you get to know exactly the color that you want your burn to look like on that particular piece of wood you get to pick and choose from a grid so that there's no mistakes when you go and burn now you're going to sacrifice a piece of wood no doubt but that's what that's what lasering is all about if you want professional look so you're gonna sacrifice that that piece of wood there's no doubt about it but you're gonna get the exact color or shade of gray that you want by running these tests you have one sacrificial piece of wood one small piece of wood let's say you're going to do an engraving you just need like a 4x4 piece of wood to sacrifice and you go and pick and choose the color of that engraving that you want and now you can even get into layers and this is the fun part because you can have some of the engraving like a graphic of vector graphic for example you can have some layers done in a really light engraving other layers done in a dark engraving and you can get dimensional looks out of your work so there is your material test generator built into light burn for newbies that have never done this before and are confused about the universal test card video that i did now i'll put a link or actually at the end of this video i'm going to put one of the links at the end of the video you'll see the universal test card video so you can go ahead and click on that and i'll also put a link down below in the description if you want to watch that one next that's much more advanced it gives you a lot of different settings than this does but this is your basic test card and you could you could work with this forever all you have to do is set up your rows set up your columns with your speed and your power and there's even more in here you can do line interval and other things line interval tests and so on so uh it's it's a really nice feature in light burn it only takes a minute to set up and i know that sometimes the videos get a little confusing because i have to go off off topic a little bit it's not really going off topic but you know like saying you got to go to the manufacturer's website and you know get your parameters for different types of materials but i mean that's just necessary if you want to do this for a business if you want to have professional results you're not you know you're not just burning some mom on a piece of wood you know you want to really have some professional results for your engravings using graphics using vector graphics with this you can get different shades of gray many different shades of of gray and you can design your vector graphics with all different shades to burn onto the wood that will look absolutely awesome and i've done that with my christmas my christmas santa cutting board so you know all of the different graphics are different shades of gray and it gives it a nice sort of colorized look so doing a test grid and you know lots of people ask questions in the facebook groups in the forum how do i get my settings down the only way to get your settings down is with a test grid your your laser is not going to be the same as mine it's not going to be the same as the next one that ran off the assembly line there are so many different variables involved especially when it comes to wood you you have the ambient temperature you have the moisture content of the wood you have the manufacturer of the wood how they manufacture it if it's plywood you know what are the uh how thick are the veneers what is the fill made of what type of glue do they use there's so many different variables that you can never say i can't say to you i can cut plywood you know at 200 millimeters per minute and 80 power 5 millimeter plywood doesn't mean that you can because there are too many variables involved so that's what this material test generator is for and to go even further you can move on to the universal test card if you want to do things like living hinges and stuff like that so anyway without getting too far off topic now i hope that this has opened your eyes if you're new to laser engraving i understand the universal test card video may have been a little confusing so i wanted to elaborate on this basic material test card generator built into light burn and show you exactly how to use it exactly how to get your starting numbers and how to set it up so that you can run your own tests and i'm hoping that i'm going to make you into a professional laserologist so anyway i hope you enjoyed this video as much as i enjoyed making it for you and as always i thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: The Louisiana Hobby Guy

Views: 58,493

Keywords: laser, lightburn, laser engraving, ortur, ortur laser, ortur lasermaster 2, lm2, lm2p, lightburn tutorials, hobby laser, c02 laser, laser engraving machine for wood, lightburn projects, lightburn software tutorials, lightburn manual, lightburn settings for wood, lightburn material settings, lightburn material library, lightburn material library file

Id: RiFJiLDj9Rs

Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022