After Every Lightburn Update: Verify Before You Burn
Lightburn updates are good, and they occasionally break things silently. Field reports include an update that froze machines mid-engrave for 3 of 10 operators in the same training group, and another that quietly reset a calibrated X-scale to 100% with no warning, so every part came out the wrong size. Five minutes of verification after each update prevents a ruined part or a lost settings library.
The post-update checklist
- Scale %: open Device Settings and confirm your calibrated scale values survived. Then burn the 2-minute check: business card, 35mm circle, caliper X and Y center-to-center (see Lens Calibration). If it's not 35.0 in both axes, re-enter the correction.
- Units: confirm mm/s (or whatever your recipes are written in). An update that flips units turns every saved recipe into nonsense numbers.
- Device settings: walk your device profiles (one per lens) and confirm field size, correction file, and frequency limits are intact.
- Material Library: open it and confirm your entries are all there and openable.
- One scrap test mark with a known-good recipe before any customer part touches the bed.
Insurance, before the update ever runs
- Export the Material Library (Material Library → Export) before updating, and again whenever it changes. It's your shop's crown jewels in one file; see Material Library Files (.clb).
- Screenshot known-good Device Settings per lens. When a field resets silently, the screenshot is how you notice and how you restore.
- Don't update the day before a production deadline. Update on a slow day, verify, then trust it.
Never click "make default for all"
Unrelated to updates but in the same "one click, big damage" family: Lightburn's Make Default for All button overwrites the settings of EVERY layer with the current one. One click destroys every carefully-built layer setup in the file, including multi-sublayer recipes. If you want to reuse settings, save them to the Material Library and apply per layer instead.