 In this video, I'm going to show you how to align your laser to your material in three easy steps. My name's Jim and this is the edge of tech. So I get a ton of questions about centering your material on the build surface of your laser to get a nice even burn like this one. Well, I can tell you that in three easy steps, I can show you how to do that using Lightburn. Now Lightburn is a software you can pay for, but you can try it for free for 30 days. The link is in the description below. I have no affiliate with them or anything. I just really believe in their product. It's an amazing product for lasers. So today, using Lightburn, I'm going to show you how to create a frame. I'm going to show you how to center that frame on your material, and I'm going to show you how to see the frame on your material. Then if you stick around, I'm going to give you one more bonus tip. So in the interest of keeping this video short and getting you up and going faster, let's do it. So Lightburn is open. And at the top left, you notice we have Lightburn version 0.9.20. And that is an actual brand new version of Lightburn and updated last night. But this should work going backwards. It's all about the same. So step number one, grab your square tool here, come out, hold control on your keyboard and draw yourself a square. When you got your square drawn, come back to the left and click your cursor tool. And I want to make this the size of the canvas or tile or coaster or whatever you're going to burn on. What I want to do is make this the size of the material. In my case, let's do four inches by four inches, because I'm going to show you a tile today. So I'm going to lock this so the ratio stays the same if anything gets changed. And then I'm going to come into the center here where it gives you the crosshair. And I'm going to move this down to let's say about right there. It's not quite center of the bed, but it's close, maybe maybe right there. So you put it on the bed or on the surface wherever you want to do your burn at. In my case, I'm going to do it right there. Then what I want to do is make this an actual burn layer. I like the color blue. So I'm going to use the blue layer number one. And if we go to the right, we'll see that this is a fill layer. I use 3000 speed. That's millimeters a minute and 50 power. I'm using the Artour laser master to 20 watt version with the G8 lens. That's just the power I used before. So once we have it in the blue, you can really see it. Step number two, what we need to do is find the center and align our work. So I like to go over here to the job origin on the right side, make sure it's in the center. You can use the top right, top left, whatever you want. In my case, I'm going to use the center. And then I'm going to go to the move tab. And I want to make sure I have this fire button right here. If you do not see this fire button, we have to back up and do the next couple steps. So you should see this if you're using a diode laser. If you do not, here we go go to the top left where it says edit, go to device settings. And on the right side here, you say something called enable laser fire button. Make sure that's green. If it's off, turn it on. And what that's going to do is it's going to test, it's going to enable the test fire button that's used for focusing diode lasers. And it can be incredibly dangerous for CO2 lasers. If you use this, be extremely careful and use as low as power as you can. That's a disclaimer from lightburn. So once that's enabled, hit okay. And if you did not have this enabled, and if you did not have it enabled originally, you'll have to close lightburn and reopen it for that button to come. So what's going to happen if I click this fire button, it's going to come on at 0.75% power and show the laser on the machine. And we're going to do that now to find the center of our work. So what we want to do after we have our fire button enabled, and we have the center origin shows right down here is we want to click this little button right here. And what that button does is it sets the laser position by clicking on the page, you can click anywhere on your build surface, and the laser will move there. This is the same in a CO2 laser. So you click it, you bring it over. That's about the center of our project. And you hit go. And you'll watch the laser move to the center of where it wants that project to be. When we find the center, I'm going to hit this fire button. And when I hit that fire button, the beam is going to come on. And I'm going to place my tile about in the center of where that beam is. So let's try that now. So I hit the fire button, the beam comes on. I can take my tile, and I can place it about in the center of where I think the center will be. So I'm thinking somewhere in about right there. So as you can see, the beam is right in the center there. I have my safety glasses on just in case always where your safety glasses when your beam is on. And then this is the center of your tile. Now some people will come down and mark center, and they'll mark center and draw lines in and put a dot with a pencil right in the center of their work. That's a very good idea. In this case, I'm showing you on a piece I already burned. So I don't want to do that. But just so you know, you want to try to find about the center of that work. So now we're back in light burn. Once we found about the center of our work, we're going to turn off that fire button by clicking it again. So after we turned off the fire button, we'll go to step number three and the final step of aligning your work for your laser. So if I hit this frame button, what it's going to do is go around the perimeter of our tile at four inches. So I'll show you what that looks like on the camera. If I hit this, you'll see the laser move. And it goes around where it's going to burn. The issue with that is is we can't see exactly where it's going to burn on the bed or on our material, because there's no dot, there's no laser guidance or anything like that yet. So what we want to do is I'm going to turn this up a little bit so you guys can see it on the camera. But I'm going to hold shift key. And I'm going to hit that frame button. And when I do that, you're going to see the laser go in a frame again. But this time, it's actually going to fire the laser at whatever percentage you have it set at, keep it as low as you can. In this case, I just turned it up so the camera would catch it better. But I only shift key, hit that frame button and watch what happens. Perfect. So it goes around the outside of the laser. And we're pretty close. So at this point, what you want to do is look at that. You'd want to hold your shift key down, hit that button again, and kind of watch where it is. It looks like it's a little bit far to the right. And a little, it's about right up and down, but a little bit far to the right. So we're just going to move it over to the right, just a hair. So we move it over just a hair, just enough to be a little bit better aligned. And then once we move it over, hit shift again, hit that fire button, and we should see it just about perfect. That looks great. And that's it. Once you have your material framed, anything you do will be lined up. Now you want to make sure that it's straight, that if you're watching your laser go, it's not drifting off up or down or anything like that. Make sure everything is straight inside of that frame. So that was the three steps in getting your laser aligned with the material you're working on. And it's very easy. Once you do it a couple of times, you'll get it going. Now sometimes it takes five, six tries to get that thing lined up. And that is okay, because if you line it up, you're going to get a better burn every time. So here's a bonus for you. Right now we have this highlighted in its blue. I like to do this around almost everything I burn. You don't have to do this, but this is just how I like to do this. Come down here and hit the T1 or tool one button, and that'll change everything to orange in our square. So if I go look at the cut and layers tab, it's now a tool layer. Right now it is on, I can turn it off by clicking this button, I can turn it back on here. Also this frame button here will enable or disable the layer when computing the origin and framing operations. So if you leave this on, it's actually going to frame around this when it's computing the origin and where everything goes. So what I like to do is create my path just like I showed you, change it to a tool path like this. Then I like to go find a project to put inside of it. I'll just use this, I need coffee because it's early. I'm going to put it right in the center of my project and here's a little secret bonus tip number two. If you have your project outlined and it's a tool path or another path, if you go right to the center in light burn, you'll see the crosshair come up. If you grab that crosshair and drag it, it should find the center between the current layer and the layer that you're putting it into. In this case, they're both four inches or darn near four inches and it centered it perfect. So as you saw, it snapped in. If I drag it out, you can see that again. Ready? Snap, just like that. I know that this is perfectly centered in that tile we already aligned on the build surface. So now all I have to do to check that is hit my shift key, hit this frame button and on the camera, you can see exactly where it's going to frame and it did not change anything. Now, what I obviously what you need to do is change this to a tool path that's going to work. In our case, we'll use blue and it says it's an image. I like to use vector files, but that's a whole nother video. Once it is in there and you see this is your blue layer, there's an orange layer underneath it. You have it you have it to your output here and you set your settings to wherever you need them and you hit go. So the cool thing about that, so the cool thing about this is we know that this image here is going to burn in the center of the tile we already aligned. It can be any size that you make that in this case was a four by four tile. And as long as your tile is aligned on the build surface over on the laser, you're going to get a straight aligned image every single time. So there you have it. I showed you how to create a frame and light burn. I showed you how to position your material on the build surface of your laser and I showed you how to show where that laser is actually going to burn on the frame. Also, I gave you the bonus tip of putting your image, your file or whatever you're going to burn inside of that frame. So you make sure it's centered every single time. I hope you learned something today. I hope this video helped. And as always, keep burning. Hey everybody, I hope you liked the video today. I hope you guys learned something. If you did, give me that thumbs up, hit that subscribe button right here and the bell right over here to get notified anytime we go live on Monday nights for hot makes or anytime a great new video comes out. I really appreciate you guys watching these laser videos. You guys rock.