Mastering Lightburn Material Test for Better Results

so the other day a viewer Chris left this comment up above in a video and Chris is struggling with getting the right material settings for a longer b130 Watt and occur it occurred to me that there are probably lots of people in a similar situation maybe it's your first time laser and you just got it and you're trying to understand basically what the heck is going on so what I thought I'd do is in this video is address Chris's comments specifically and show you all of the things you need to do to determine all the settings you need for any piece of material that you could possibly want to engrave now the good news is if you have light burn then you already have all the tools you need to make this happen so with that let's get started how's it going everybody Steve here welcome back to my workshop now I want to address Chris's comment specifically here so I am going to use this longer B1 behind me but if you have a different laser you've probably had similar problems and you will try and solve everybody's problem here in this video regardless of the kind of laser you have or the kind of material you're trying to determine the settings for and I want to try and keep this tutorial under five minutes so we're going to dive in really quickly here and we're going to start in light burn so I've got light burn fired up here and I've I've configured the longer B1 Laser Now light burn provides a bunch of built-in tools and these are the ones we're going to use for this video if you click on the laser tools menu option here you'll see a bunch of things the one we're going to focus on is the material test and if you just open that when you start you're going to get a bunch of random seemingly random numbers and what I'm going to do is for the speed range which is which which will be the vertical axis I'm going to go from 100 to a thousand which is for a 30 watt laser is a good place to start and I'm going to make the square size four millimeters just to keep things smallish and the power of course we're going to go from 10 to 100 percent and I can do a preview here and you can see that you would get nice even numbers all the way up the vertical scale and even numbers on the horizontal scale and it just makes the numbers easier to understand so that's all we need to do for the first one now if we want to look at the material setting here you'll see that the mode is aligned so we're going to actually do cuts so this one specifically will be a cut test and it's something I always do with material if you're not doing cuts on your material in the case of Chris's situation the material is bamboo and maybe there isn't cutting going on it's probably a cutting board or something so you might want to skip this but it's something I generally try to do with any piece of material so all I'm going to do the cut and I'll show you what we get now I won't bore you with uh seven and a half minutes of watching a laser cut out little squares here but suffice it to say that that at each of the power speed combinations we did a cut and when you're done you'll see that there are places where there are holes cut in places where they aren't and what does this tell you it tells you that that there are combinations that you can cut so for example ninety percent at 500 millimeters per minute is guaranteed to give you a good cut on this material the next thing we're going to do is now an engrave test on this material and see what it looks like all right so I went back into the material test generator in light burn and I'm going to do some adjustments here I'm going to set the minimum speed to 3000 millimeters a minute and the maximum to 12 000 millimeters a minute and the power will remain the same but over in the material settings themselves I'm going to change the mode from line to fill and what that will do is instead of drawing little squares it will draw filled in squares at the current power and speed settings so that's all I'm going to do and now I'll do the engrave and if we take a look at the results here you can see we get a a nicely shaded area ranging from complete Blackness infected burn through there at 100 3000 millimeters all the way up to almost nothing and you can just simply pick the shade that you want and you'll also see that some of those have specific depth so it's a pretty easy selection and it makes it very easy to determine what the right setting is now that should give you a good idea of of The Cutting settings and the engraving settings you're going to need for any particular material but there's one more test I like to do and this one you won't find in light burn it's one that I do on my own and I created a light burn project now if you're a member of the channel I'll put the this light burn file up on the member site but if you're not a member and you don't want to become a member and that's understandable you can create this fairly simply and I'll show you what it looks like now okay and here I am back in lightburn I've loaded my project now this test is only useful if you're doing grayscale engraving so I think photo engraving but you want that higher quality of grayscale rather than dithering if you're dithering pick one of the settings you got off your engraving test and use that but here we're actually changing the power as we're engraving so what this one will tell us is what the best speed for Engraving a photo is using grayscale all right now if we look at the results here you can see at the 2000 millimeter a minute line the extreme right is very very dark but it's also really charred if you look at the actual output going down to the Other Extreme you can see that the boundary between mostly white and mostly dark is shifted more to the right so generally a better balance from a gradient perspective the right hand side is definitely a lot lighter so you might want to use that 10 000 millimeter a minute speed for for doing photo engraving with grayscale 8 000 looks all right too I wouldn't say four thousand is acceptable unless you want something with really dark output or or it's mostly a light image so that's the results for for grayscale Engraving too all right so Chris and anyone else who are having difficulties getting the material settings right hopefully this helped and makes your experience a little bit a little bit better and certainly you waste a little less material so with that we can wind down uh as always I'll put a video up in the corner here go watch that I'll see you over there and get out there make your world and I'll see you next time

Channel: Steve Makes Everything

Views: 21,236

Keywords: Steve Makes Everything, elegoo phecda, engrave, engraving, laser cutter, laser cutter projects, laser cutting, laser engraving, laser engraving machine, laser material settings, laser materials, laser projects, laser settings, lightburn, material, material settings, materials, xtool d1 pro 20w, diode laser, light burn, workshop tutorial, power settings, material test, engrave test, material testing, lightburn settings, lightburn software, laser material, laser tutorial

Id: cBrwh5pLChY

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023