LightBurn Learn: Volume 1
Welcome to LightBurn Learn! We'll be featuring creators, LightBurn staff, projects, and other content to inspire your projects and help you do more with LightBurn. With schools starting back up (at least in much of the northern hemisphere) in August and September, we'll be starting off with a release focused on schools and education. Some of the content here is specific to formal schools, but much of it is also relevant to less formal learning spaces, such as makerspaces.
If you're not a teacher, not to worry - we have some general interest content here for you, and future releases will focus on other topics.
Meet the Team Member¶
For our education-oriented first release, we'll be starting off with our documentation lead Jackie Gerstein, a former high school technology teacher.
Purchasing, Privacy, and Licensing for Schools¶
We know that schools, especially public schools, often have specific requirements for purchasing software. These vary from school to school, but we've got information for you on how our license works, what data we collect and how we use it, and how to purchase LightBurn. We also have commonly requested forms such as our W-9 available for you to download.
If you haven't been able to purchase LightBurn in the past because you work for an institution that requires the use of purchase orders, I've got some good news - we can accept purchase orders now, with payment by debit/credit card or ACH transfer. You can find more information here.
One thing to note - while we want to support educators of all sorts, and will happily provide information and help you to the best of our ability, as a small company selling software for $99 or $199, we're not equipped to handle custom legal agreements for individual purchases.
Licensing and Purchasing¶
Frequently asked questions about educational licensing, commonly required documents, and information on our purchasing process.
LightBurn EULA¶
A copy of LightBurn's End User License Agreement, available for your convenience.
Laser Safety in the Classroom¶
Fire Safety¶
Fires can happen fast, and lasers should never be run without supervision. Click here to see the aftermath of a laser fire and read some fire safety tips.
Classroom Workflow¶
Getting an entire group of students using the laser in a short time is rough, especially when there's just one teacher! The first time I had to do it, it was a rough week, but I learned a lot and worked out how to get things running more smoothly.
Checklist¶
There are a lot of little details to remember when laser cutting and even experienced adults forget steps from time to time. Not that I'd ever accidentally start a job with the wrong Start From mode...
LightBurn's built-in Job Checklist can help, but it only comes up when you're getting ready to send the file to the laser.
Back when I was teaching, one of the things that helped me getting entire classes through a project on the laser cutter, CNC router, or other tools was building checklists into their assignment sheets.The checklists helped prevent common mistakes, and provided students with information they needed right when they could act on it, which cut down on repeated questions. My checklists evolved over time, especially as students discovered new and interesting ways to make mistakes. I usually inserted a checkpoint or two where students needed my initials to progress further. On the laser, that might be before sending a job to the laser control computer and before actually running the job.
While everybody's classroom workflow is going to be a little different, I'm sharing a checklist based on how I used to set them up in my own assignment sheets.
Template Files¶
LightBurn's Template Files are an easy way to provide a LightBurn file as a starting point for a project. Template files can't be accidentally overwritten with an ordinary save, and they can contain artwork and pre-configured layers to give all your students a consistent starting point on a project.
Shared Settings¶
If you're using more than one computer, sharing LightBurn settings among multiple computers can make things a lot easier for you. Our Shared Settings guide helps with initial setup and ongoing updates to your settings.
Projects and Other Resources¶
- Our Laser Engraved Pencils project walks you through creating custom engraved pencils. You'll start by creating a fixture to hold the pencils, then use our Template File to create and repeat your design before engraving it on the pencils. You can use this project as written, or take the methods we used — creating a fixture, using Grid Arrays, and using Variable Text — to customize any number of other things.
- Our Image Engraving on Coasters project is a good starting point to get students working with the laser. The example coasters were made in slate, but you can use whatever material works best for you and fits your budget. This is a good opportunity to learn about the Current Position Start From mode and get started working with images.
From our Forum¶
If you haven't already visited our forum, it's worth checking out. At our forum, you'll find LightBurn and MillMage users and staff sharing their projects and troubleshooting when things go wrong. It's also a great place to get updates about what's coming up in LightBurn and MillMage.
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For those of you with an Epilog laser, LightBurn's 2.2 Early Access build now supports Epilog lasers as a Labs feature.
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LesSables on our forum has an ongoing thread with a variety of MillMage projects, including a watch mechanism clock, a decorative lamp, and a home automation panel.
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This is an older post, but a few years ago we had a good conversation on the forum with a teacher using LightBurn and a Thunder Laser in his classroom.