The New Hotness

Up to this point I’ve been making mirror alignment targets entirely on the laser cutter to ensure accurate alignment:

While that works fine, using Dot Mode takes basically forever to chew its way through any nontrivial number of targets.

Now that I have more familiarity with LightBurn’s Print-and-Cut feature, I tried printing the graticules, aligning the sheet, then laser-cutting just the perimeters:

The smaller targets fit neatly into the hole perpendicular to the beam:

The larger ones sit flush on the mirrors at 45° to the beam, so stretching the horizontal scale by 1.414 = √2 makes each tick mark correspond to 1 mm of perpendicular beam offset.

All of which worked surprisingly well, with some caveats.

The first gotcha: ordinary consumer-grade inkjet printers do not have CNC accuracy. The corner targets are on 150 mm horizontal centers and 240 mm vertical centers in the LightBurn layout, but my Epson ET-3830 printer put them on 150×241.3 mm centers. This isn’t unexpected, particularly for laser printers, but it means you must use LightBurn’s scaled version of the P-n-Cut alignment.

I used the upper-right and lower-left targets for the P-n-Cut alignment step, confirming the positioning with a laser pulse putting a tiny hole in the paper:

The lines are 0.5 mm wide and the inner circle is 2 mm in diameter, so my alignment at the upper right is as good as it’s gonna get and the lower left is off by maybe 0.3 mm. While it may be possible to be more accurate, I think half a millimeter is a reasonable error budget for targeting accuracy.

The laser-perforated circles should overlay the inner printed circles after LightBurn applies the P-n-C corrections. That they obviously do not indicates the effect of the small target errors. In any event, the maximum error seems to be 1 mm, which gives you an idea of just how precise P-n-C might be.

The perimeter laser cuts are off by about the same amount & direction as the dotted circle in the adjacent target:

Overall, errors around 1 mm seem possible with careful attention to detail, but expecting anything better than a few millimeters is probably unreasonable, particularly for layouts larger than a Letter size page.

Works for me, though!

The LightBurn SVG layout as a GitHub Gist: