Lightburn Starter Kit Walk-Through

Hello, J.J.

here from Chalkwatts.

Welcome to my little corner of the Internet.

If you are watching this video, then you have probably just downloaded my free Lightburn Starter Kit.

And rather than just letting you figure it out on your own, I figured I would make this little video to kind of walk you through what is in the Starter Kit so that you can understand what it's for and how to use it.

And more specifically, we're going to cover three things in this video here.

Number one, I'm going to give you an overview of the different files that are inside the Starter kit, because there are several different files that you get inside of this kit.

There's the second thing we're going to cover is what the purpose of each of those files are, because they are basically all meant for something a little bit different.

And the third thing that we'll cover as we go through this video is basically how you can adjust each of these files in order to make it possible to use it on your own laser.

Because each of these is really meant to be a template, right?

And so you're going to have to make some adjustments to it before you can run it on your own laser.

So with that all said, let's get right into the details and we're going to jump into my computer with a little bit of a screen share to make some of these things more clear.

So first things first, when you download the Lightburn Starter Kit, which I'm showing here in my, folders over here, it's going to come in as a zip folder.

And so to unzip that on a Mac, which is what I'm running right here, you can just double click on a Windows computer, this would be a right click and then go down to extract all.

But either way, you're going to get this regular, folder that's Lightburn Starter Kit, and then you can open this up and there are two main folders inside of this, which basically are organizing two different types of files that you get for, for free with the Light Burn Starter Kit.

The first one is the five test grids, which is this one up here on top.

And we will talk in a lot more detail about that.

But the second one is free project files.

So let's talk about this one first, because this will be a little bit quicker to cover.

So I'll open this up and basically there is one file in here right now at the time of recording, but I plan to probably add some more to this down the road.

But anyway, this is basically free example projects that are designs that my wife or I have made, in Lightburn that you can use for, for your own projects to kind of get going with light burn and start making some projects on your own laser.

And this is a.

I'll just open this one up as an example.

This is a hot air balloon design which was in my first, Light Burn 101 video on YouTube.

Some people in the comments and places asked for it and or asked if it was available.

And rather than trying to, you know, sell it for five bucks on Etsy or something like that, I decided just to, give it away for, for free here in this starter kit.

So, so anyway, you can get in here and play with this project file.

And as I said, I might be adding more to this in the future.

but what I want to mention before we move on is basically what you would adjust before trying to run a project like this.

And we'll just go through it real quickly because we'll talk more about some of these things as we go through the five test grids.

So this file, I believe, was originally set up for running on my 20 watt diode laser.

And so for most people you're going to have to make adjustments for this.

And in fact, even, even if you have a 20 watt diode laser, you probably should make some adjustments make just to make sure that these settings that you're using are going to work well for running this project.

And the main things, I'm, I'm basically kind of giving you the, the 10,000 foot view here, right?

And if you're going to run this project and if you're brand new, then you probably want to go watch some Lightburn 101 videos and things of that nature to really understand what you're doing at a deeper level before running a project like this.

But just to give you the 10,000, foot view here, the main things that you would need to adjust would be your speed over here, your power and your interval.

As I said, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but those are the main things that you would probably end up tweaking.

And so with this now covered briefly, let's go back to the five test grids and we'll talk about those in more detail.

So here we are back at the Lightburn starter kit.

two folders here.

And again, what we were just looking at are the free project files.

So again, this will have, at least one and maybe more depending on when you are watching this video, files in it that are basically Free example projects for you to get into, look at the design and start using them basically as practice projects to start learning and getting up to speed on things.

And so that's what that is.

But if I come back out here to these two main folders, the first one here is the five test grids.

And this is what I'm guessing the majority of people will be coming to the Lightburn starter kit for.

So let's open this up and we'll talk about what each of these different files are and then we'll, we'll open them up and talk about them in a little bit more detail.

So the first one Here is the 3P cut test.

And so let's go ahead and open this up up.

And the first thing that you'll probably notice about this file is that it's called the 3P.

And you're probably wondering what that means.

And P in this case stands for parameter.

And it's basically another way of saying variable.

And so this is a three variable cut test, which means that it's able to test three different things at once rather than two.

And if you have been around the laser world for a little bit, you may have seen or heard of the built in test generators in Lightburn.

And if you're brand new to this, don't worry, I'm going to show you where it is.

Just as an example here, if you come up here to Laser tools and go down here, there are some test generators in light burn and the most commonly used one for me is material test.

And now if I open this up, it basically gives me a little dialog box with some settings which allows me to use this generator to create like a simple, test, particularly for power and speed.

And here you see that parameter that we're talking about.

Parameter, parameter.

These are basically the things that it's testing.

Most commonly you're going to use, speed and power, but sometimes you might want to use one of these other ones as well.

And so just to give you an idea of what this is going to create for you, if you use the generator in light burn, it's basically going to create like a big grid with different rectangles.

And you may have seen something like this online already if you've watched some Lightburn tutorials.

this is a very important tool.

But the one in Lightburn, although I use it all of the time, it does have some limitations.

And those limitations are the reasons that I've created the five test grids that you're getting in the starter kit.

Because each of these five different custom tests that I put together allow you to do something that the built in test generator is not able to do, at least at the time of recording.

And so what I'm going to walk you through now is basically what I have in this as well as the other custom tests that I put together.

And, and what specifically it will allow you to do that the built in Lightburn tools will not allow you to do.

Okay, Just to hopefully make this easier to follow here, I've put an actual cutout of the light burn test here in my other camera feed.

And so we'll talk about both here briefly.

in Lightburn, what we're looking at is basically a test where we're testing basically different speed settings on our rows.

So it goes from 10 to 30 in the rows.

So each of these rows is testing a slightly different speed.

Okay.

And then in the columns we are testing different power levels.

Okay, Pretty, pretty simple enough, right?

And so each intersection of power and speed is different for each of these stars.

Okay?

So each of these stars is going to give us a slightly different result where things get different than the built in light burn, tests is where we have this line, okay?

So we have this line right here and on the right hand side we have three additional rows.

Now these three additional rows are at the same same speed settings that are marked here on the far left hand side.

So these are still running at 30 millimeters per second, in this case, 25 millimeters per second and 20 millimeters per second.

And the power percentage of the columns is marked here.

Okay?

But the main difference is that everything on the left of this line here in the middle is done with one pass and everything on the right is done with two passes.

Okay?

And if you're brand new to this, I'll again just briefly kind of show what the passes are.

So if I open up this, this one right here, which is basically the layer that's controlling the settings on my Bluestars, we will be able to see that there is a setting here for number of passes.

And basically all this means is the number of times that the laser head is going to follow the design of, of everything that's on that layer, all the way through.

So for example, again this, these, these blue stars here, if I tell it to do one pass, it's just going to trace the outline of all of these stars one time and then it's done.

However, on the right hand side when we look at these These light blue stars.

I've set this one and this is this layer here in light burn.

So I'll open that up so you can see.

This is now two passes.

Okay.

And what that means is that, with these stars here in the light blue, basically it's going to trace the outline of these stars twice for every single one.

So it's gonna do them all once and then it's gonna go and it's gonna do them all again.

This is particularly useful if you are doing, the test on like a lower powered laser.

So for example, diode lasers a lot of times have a lower power.

And doing a test like this can help you, understand if you're gonna be good with one pass or if actually doing two passes is going to give you a better result and help cuts that have like, little tags still sticking on.

And so that's just one example of a reason why you might want to test two passes versus one, with a custom test grid like this one.

All right, so now what I'm going to do before we move on to the other test grids is just give you a quick overview of how you would go about adjusting the settings on a test grid like this such that it will fit your own laser.

And as I said when we were talking about the project files, these test grids are also really just meant to be templates and so they will need to be adjusted.

But before you can run them on your own laser.

And the basic process for how you would go about doing that is what I'm going to give you an overview of now.

Now, if you've seen one of my test grid tutorials on YouTube already, some of this will be familiar with you.

but if you haven't, you might want to watch one of those after watching this video because it will likely give you a bit more information that is going to be helpful to you, in sort of the context of how this works.

But I'm going to do my best to kind of give you the most concise version of it here so that we can move on to the other test grids.

And so basically how this works is you need to begin with a start point.

Okay, so let's just say you were doing the same thing as me.

You have a cut test for quarter inch maple.

What you would do is you would go to Google and you would search for, suggested or recommended material test settings for your specific laser manufacturer.

And so, for example, if you had a Thunder laser, you would go and you would look for, material settings recommended, on the, the Thunder Laser website, and a lot of laser manufacturers do have this nowadays.

And then what you would do when you found that page from your laser manufacturer manufacturer is find recommended settings specific to your model and wattage of laser.

Okay.

And then the, basically you would find the material that's closest to what you're doing.

So you may be able to find exactly maple plywood on there, or you might find something that's similar.

So for example, maybe you find cherry plywood that's of the same size quarter inch still, that might be close enough to use as a start point.

Hopefully you'll kind of get the idea there.

And and then what I would do once I have those recommended settings is I would bring them in here and basically base all of my settings for this test grid off of that start point.

In this specific cut test, I would probably put the start point about here.

Okay.

And so sort of on the lower middle range of the settings.

So let's just say as an example, your, your manufacturer recommended, 4 quarter inch maple cuts 15 millimeters per second and then 80% power.

this exact template here is what your test grid would end up looking like.

if you do it in the way that I personally would go about it, which is basically make this point, that setting, and then kind of just distribute all of this power and speed, from there as you go to kind of fill things out.

And to help you understand how to do that, I'll just point out two more quick things about how these test grids are set up and how these settings can be adjusted.

So if we highlight an entire row here, so I have this yellow row that corresponds to this, number four yellow row right here in the, in the menu.

And, and what you'll see if we look at this is that they all have the same, speed.

So they're all on this row.

So they're all 15 millimeters per second, which means this is very easy.

We just punch in 15 millimeters per second here.

However, they all have different powers, even though they're on one layer.

And the thing in lightburn that makes that possible is that we have this entire row set to a, max power of 100.

Okay.

So these are all set to max power 100.

However, there's this additional menu here called Shape Properties.

And if you open that up and you select an individual shape, you'll notice that the power scale setting is adjusted to match the power that we want to test.

So this one is 90 this one is 80 and this one is 70.

You get the idea.

So that's what allows us in light burn to have an entire row like this on one layer without making each individual thing sort of its own layer.

This is how we, we get a full row on a layer with different powers, rather than making each individual star its own layer.

So that's basically what you would do is you would adjust the entire row, the speed or the power, whatever, you need to adjust there.

And then you can also adjust the power that goes to them by going to shape properties and then changing this power scale.

So hopefully that's making sense.

And again, if you need some more information on how these tests operate.

So then I would again suggest, checking out one of my tutorials on YouTube for how to use, this sort of test.

But for now let's go ahead and move on to the other test grids.

And I think we're going to pick some more stuff up along the way and you'll also see what those other tests are for.

So now I've just pulled up this 3P engraved test, which is our second test grid here.

And I, have it open in Lightburn already.

And my camera feed is now our example version of this, cut out on wood using this file.

And so what we're looking at here is something that will look pretty similar to what we had with the cut test.

However, there are a few important differences.

So first of all, this is of course an engraved test instead of a cut test.

However, you'll notice that the third parameter, so we again have speed and power, but our third parameter instead of being one pass versus two passes this time, is a standard engrave and a score outline engrave.

And this is something that I personally think can give you a really cool effect.

And it's also, I think, not talked about enough in sort of the dialing in your engraving settings world, out there on the Internet when it comes to laser engraving.

So anyway, if you look at the sample, you'll really notice the difference that this makes.

So we have the standard engraving here on the left, but on the right side we have the out the score outline engraved.

And I think you'll really be able to tell very clearly that this score outline can make these stars really popular in a much different way than the standard engraving.

And that's not to say that it's better, but it definitely does give you a different effect.

So overall, this test grid that we're looking at here is doing two things that the Normal built in light burn test generator will not allow you to do.

The first thing that we've already talked about is that it's testing three parameters.

But the second thing is that it's allowing us to also test using a score outline.

And so if you look at the light burn file here, actually all of these rows with like the blue, these, these are all on the same layer.

But if you zoom in you'll see that there is an additional layer.

So I'll make this, I'll make this flash here.

So watch over in the space you'll see that the, the outline portion is flashing there.

And basically what I've done is I've just, and I, I'll actually, I'll ruin my file a bit here to make it, make it so you can see.

So basically on top of this exact, a copy of this exact setup, basically I've created an additional layer of layers in Lightburn that create the outline.

So basically for each of these stars in order to do this test we have one layer that's doing the fill engraving and then another one that comes in afterwards and does that score outline.

And so this was what makes that possible.

And you're not able to do that using Lightburn's built in generator.

And as you can see, I think it gives you a really cool effect that is worth comparing to a normal engraving.

especially for certain types of projects this won't be right for every project, but for some I think it will really make things pop and look a lot nicer and more professional.

Test grid number three is called the high speed interval test, grid here.

And I've already pulled it up in lightburn and I have it here again in my camera feed.

Now this file I made in order to solve a very specific problem that I have with my laser.

And I will show you exactly what this problem is.

So there is an interval test generator in light burn very similar to the material test generator.

And if I open this up they have a setting for speed.

But for reasons that I do not understand, Lightburn has made it so that the maximum possible speed on an interval test is nine, hundred ninety nine.

In other words, you can't go to a thousand or higher.

And if you have a very fast laser, so especially lasers that have like metal tubes or RF tube lasers, they will sometimes go faster than this.

And that happens to be the case for my machine.

So, so if you happen to have a very fast machine and you're not able to use this interval Test to test at the high speeds that you want to be engraving at.

Then you might find my high speed interval test grid useful as a template.

And so basically this is just with very fast settings, testing different intervals.

So basically keeping the power and speed the same, but changing the interval to help dial that in.

And so that's what this is for.

If you're not familiar with what interval is, then I have some, some videos on my channel, my YouTube channel about about engraving photos and that that kind of explains what interval is and how you dial it in for, for lasers in a nutshell.

And so you might want to check one of those out if you want more explanation.

But that's basically what this is for, is doing interval testing with a very high speed laser.

All right, so the fourth test here in our test grids is a minimum power test.

So I've opened this here in Lightburn and what you'll see is basically a bunch of different triangles.

Premise here is that there's a setting in light burn called power minimum.

And so it looks like this, but not every laser has access to this.

I believe the lasers that do have access to this have what are called DSP controllers.

And the ones that don't are called G code, G code machines.

Okay.

And so you may or may not have access to this, but if you do, then it will allow you to do something that can be really helpful for cleaning up, cleaning up your laser work.

And so just to give you an example of the difference that this makes, look at this, this test grid from my laser.

And if you look all the way up at the 30% one, what you'll see is that the, the lines look to be in pretty good shape.

But when you go to the corners, there's a decent bit of scorching there.

And that's because at this, this triangle, the power, the maximum power and the minimum power are the same.

And so I'll just select this so that you can see.

it is this one here.

So the max power is 30% and the min power is 30%.

And, and as a result it's basically, basically taking, taking the maximum power as it goes around this, this little corner and it's causing some scorching.

But if you have the ability to specify minimum power, basically it will allow your laser to modulate as it goes around corners like this, and it will allow it to drop the power down when doing things like this so that it doesn't essentially over burn at Corners and things like that.

And you can see the difference this makes.

If you look all the way up here at the 5% power one, and you can see that these, these corners actually look, dramatically cleaner compared with the 30% one.

and so for most, CO2 lasers that have glass tubes, which is, you know, one of the most common types of laser engraver, your minimum power is going to be in the ballpark of 10%.

It might be a little bit lower, a little bit higher.

but basically what you're looking at is the minimum power at which the laser will still fire and not leave like gaps in the corners.

and for, for lasers that have metal, tubes or like RF tube lasers, these are sometimes called.

It might actually be lower for glass tubes, as I said, it's usually around 10%.

But for, a machine like I have, I have a metal tube CO2 laser, I found that my sweet spot for doing engravings is actually around 4% minimum power.

and so I actually ran this test and then I did a secondary test, which is something I'll talk more about, in a moment here.

But I did a secondary test when I saw, okay, still no gaps at 5%.

And then I engraved all the way down, to 1, 2, 3 and 4% to see @ what point I was starting to get gaps in the corners.

And then I basically just went a little bit up in my personal, setting that I like for this was 4%.

And so basically this is going to allow you to give, yourself a setting that's going to clean up corner scorch marks like this and improve the overall quality, of your engravings if you have the ability to adjust that setting.

So just two more quick things here on this minimum power test before we move on to the final test grid.

The first one is that, I kind of alluded to this, but I just want to hopefully make it crystal clear that this test is usually only going to be relevant to CO2 lasers and not to diode lasers.

And so, this is covered in quite a bit of detail in my CO2 laser course, but not in my diode laser bootcamp, because it's just simply not relevant to diode lasers, most of the time, if ever.

And so I wanted to point that out.

And also as I mentioned before, certain types of CO2 lasers also don't have the settings.

So it is only, relevant to certain types of CO2 lasers.

and so there's a bit of nuance here, but basically, if you have this minimum power option available, then you can likely benefit from this test.

So that's the first thing.

The second thing is that if you are running a CO2 laser with a glass tube, then you typically will have a minimum power around 10%.

And so if you are running this test for a glass tube CO2 laser, then you might actually want to delete these lower levels because, and I'll ungroup just to show this, because they are less likely to be relevant because it is pretty likely for a lot of glass tube CO2 lasers that the corners will basically have gaps and starting at around the 10% mark rather than those low, those lower levels that you might get, or be able to do with a metal tube laser.

And so I just wanted to point that out quickly as well.

The fifth and final test grid here is an example of what I call a secondary test.

So I pulled this up here in light burn.

And basically what this is illustrating is that after you've done some of the other tests, so let's say you've already done a test to kind of dial in the engraving settings that you want.

that is helpful.

But what you might find is when you start doing things that are more intricate or just different shapes in a design, what you might get is something that looks quite a bit different in the engraving results than you were expecting.

And so oftentimes you'll start with something like like a square or like star test grid like we looked at, looked at earlier.

And then when you're getting ready to do more, more of like an intricate design, especially if there's small details, then it can be helpful to do what I call a secondary test, which, which is basically a test grid made up of an element from your, from your actual design.

And so let's say you were doing like a big piece that had a lot of flowers basically arranged around it, some sort of design like that.

What you might do is a test grid like this example where you've just taken the, one of the flowers and arranged it on a test grid with different speed and power levels so that you can see at which variations of your engraving settings you're going to get the nicest looking results on the actual test.

So this is mainly serving as an example of a secondary test.

But you might also notice that whereas with the previous engraving test that we looked at like this one here, we were doing a fill.

So basically the middle of our shape is filled in with an engraving, whereas what we're looking at here in the secondary test is actually a line engraving.

So it's basically tracing an outline.

And so this is a slightly different type of engraving.

And so if you wanted to use this Lightburn, test file, you actually could use something like this or you could make, make your own version of this sort of flower design test grid and use it to help you dial in your line engraving settings for doing more intricate line engrave work like this.

So I just wanted to mention that as a little extra note.

So that's my little crash course on the Light Burn Starter Kit.

I hope that you found this video helpful and I hope that you'll get a lot of use out of these files.

Now, if you want to learn more about some of these things, or also just laser engraving in general, from me specifically, then there are three ways that you can do that.

The first is by reading the email newsletter.

So having signed up for the Lightburn Starter Kit, you're going to start getting some emails from me.

If you don't want to get those emails, I totally get it.

You can unsubscribe right there in the email where you got the download for this.

That's fine, no hard feelings.

I don't want to email anybody who doesn't want those emails.

But for those of you who want to learn more from me, then that is a good way to do it.

The second way is to watch the tutorials that I publish on my YouTube channel, which maybe you have found already.

And the third way is using Diode Laser Bootcamp and CO2 Laser Bootcamp, which are my beginners courses to learn laser engraving in the as little as one weekend by covering what I call the five core skills of laser engraving.

If that sounds like something that would be helpful to you, then I will leave links to both of those under this video.

But either way, I hope that you've gotten a lot out of this video you're watching right now and that you'll get a lot of use, as I said, out of these files.

So that'll close out this video and I hope to see you sometime soon.

Bye now.