Frame job boundaries

chimaeragh

Since Lightburn still doesn't fully support Duet boards, I was wondering if it might be possible to add a feature that a lot of laser control software now seem to have to our machine. The ability to trace a bounding box around the area that will be lasered/cut/3d printed by moving the laser either turned off or in a very very low power mode.
Is this something that can be done in DWC by parsing the job gcode file?

jay_s_uk

@chimaeragh its not currently baked in. i made a feature request for it way back https://forum.duet3d.com/topic/16266/firmware-request-laser-mode-frame

it could probably be done with 3.5 fairly easily though, assuming lightburn can pass some parameters (the min/max in X and Y) through as part of the gcode.
You could have a macro that takes those parameters, homes the machine if not homed and then moves the laser head to the 4 co-ordinates. Then using M291 S4 you could either accept and carry out the job, repeat the framing until the material to be cut is correctly positioned or abort the job completely.

chimaeragh

@jay_s_uk How would you accomplish this using a macro? Would you have to edit the macro each time you want to run a job? Or maybe use start.g for that purpose?
I think a right-click on the gcode file in Jobs folder and select Frame Job in the menu will be better a work-flow

jay_s_uk

@chimaeragh something like a right click option won't get added in 3.5 and probably won't make it into 3.6 either.

i've just looked at lightburn (i use it with my laser) and it looks as though no variables about the job can be passed through to a job or file in any way. ideally lightburn would have a list of placeholders that could be used when the gcode is generated but it doesn't. so unfortunately this is going to be a bit of a manual process.

droftarts

@jay_s_uk Did the framing info get added to the Lightburn header, that you asked for here https://forum.lightburnsoftware.com/t/frame-information-as-comment-at-start-of-gcode/15844 ?

If it has, @dc42 could add it to the file parser, and then a macro something like Only probe where part is to be printed could be used to frame the job when started, with an option at the end of framing to cancel, or redo framing (once the material placement can be adjusted).

Ian

jay_s_uk

@droftarts Yes it did.
Here's an example from a recently sliced file

; LightBurn 1.4.04
; GRBL device profile, absolute coords
; Bounds: X5 Y5 to X105 Y155

droftarts

@jay_s_uk I've added a feature request to Github: https://github.com/Duet3D/RepRapFirmware/issues/941

Ian

droftarts created this issue in Duet3D/RepRapFirmware

Frame job boundaries

open Add current job XY min max values to OM #941