How to: Laser cutting with camera capture

Snapmaker 2.0
1

I’ve seen many times on these forums that we should just abandon trying to use the camera capture. The main issue seems to be that lining things up with the captured image is generally seen as impossible.

I don’t accept anything in software being impossible, so I just went through and figured out how to properly use the laser module with the camera capture (at least, I got my cut (on paper) to be exactly as I lined it up in the camera view (yay for automatic cutting of my papercraft models)). So I’m going to post it here in case anyone wants a guide:

At the machine

  1. Plug in the laser module and follow all the onscreen stuff to get it updated/calibrated (I’m runninng firmware 13.1 and luban 4.0.1)
  2. Place your workpiece in the center of the bed, pin it down with the silicon plugs or some tape.

At the computer

  1. In Luban, connect to the machine over Wi-Fi (go to workspace, choose Wi-Fi, refresh, and connect)
  2. Go to laser module 3 axis
  3. Click on “Camera Capture”, then “Add Background”
  4. Click “Start”, wait for it to finish taking pics, click “Confirm” when it’s finished (go back and do camera calibration if the lines of the bed don’t line up perfectly)
  5. Open your file (little folder icon on the top left)
  6. Scale/position things properly (note: you can do multiple cuts with different settings if you have multiple images.
  7. (magic trick 1): Click “Camera Capture”, then “Remove Background”
  8. (magic trick 2): Click “Job Setup” and set the origin to “Center”, confirm
    - You should now see your chosen design in the exact same place, but the origin (orange dot) will have moved to the center of the piece.
    - Click next (bottom right) to move to creating toolpaths from your images
  9. Click your object, and “Create Toolpath”
  10. Enter the right settings per your material, and hit “Save”
    - If you have multiple paths you want at different settings, repeat steps 11-12 with each object
  11. Click “Generate G-Code and Preview”, “Export”, “Load G-code to Workspace”, and then “Send to Device via Wi-Fi”

At the machine again

  1. Disconnect from Luban and open the file
  2. Click through the prompts, I used auto mode and it worked well for me
  3. (magic trick 3): Move the toolhead to the center of the bed (on the 350, that means moving until the “Machine Coordinates” are X:160,Y:175)
  4. (final bit of magic): Choose “Set Work Origin” while the toolhead is centered
  5. Click start, and watch the laser go exactly where you lined it up with the camera!
2 Likes
2

This sounds like you’re doing all your calibration at bed level.
What happens if you try to use camera capture with something that’s raised off the bed and inch or two?
That’s when it becomes useless for anything I’ve tried to do. Can’t handle the change in parallax.

-S

1 Like
3

Yea, I mainly want to cut cardboard/paper that I’ve printed on already, just making the machine handle the cutting for me. Seeing as how you can’t really cut anything thicker than 3mm (my experiments with even 4mm cardboard just resulted in a fun little campfire in my enclosure).

The parallax issue would make sense I suppose, but you could maybe solve that by having anchor points you attempt to aim at (e.g. make 4 dots outside your intended work space, and guess&test until you hit all 4 with the laser?), might take a few tries, but it’d be a better starting point than trying to guess where you’ve positioned things on the bed.

4

I see now your topic is “laser cutting”, which then wouldn’t be more than a few mm off the bed. My point was related to engraving which doesn’t work at all as promised. Faster and easier to just find the center of an object and set the origin that way.

-S