Hello,
After a month trying to figure where my problem is, i try to put a bottle in the sea here:
I have a problem connecting my cnc/laser 3018 to grbl 1.1f on my Mac (which was in Catalina) and has now been downgraded to Big Sur 11.7.4. And all of this with the latest version of lightburn. I have been reading the forums for 1 month and so I would like to submit my question to you.
I bought a small second-hand laser engraver cutter a month ago.
The super friendly seller gave me a demonstration of how he used lightburn (which I already knew from fablabs) on his PC, in short my problem is certainly not with the machine since it worked very well and It works if I use its control panel.
I tried to connect it to my Mac running Catalina and after many attempts I still can’t get Lightburn to communicate with my machine running GRBL.
So I downgraded on osx Big Sur telling myself that it might be a conflict between the ch34x driver and Catalina but in fact my 3018 and lightburn do the same thing to me:
If I connect my machine and go to system information / USB I see a “USB Serial” device with the vendor name 0x1a86 which I think looks good.
When I do “ls /dev/tty*” I see two new devices:
/dev/tty.usbserial-14340 /dev/ttysf
/dev/tty.wchusbserial14340 /dev/ttyt0
When I turn on lightburn and choose one or the other in the console I see. “Grbl 1.1f [‘$’ for help]”
But if I try a “$” or “$$” no response. And when I check the button to see all the messages in the lightburn console the machine emits a g0 code in a loop.
So my computer sees the machine which responds with the message “I exist” but there is a communication problem afterwards.
I thought it could be related to my usb hub, but I tried 3 and all work for connection but not for control, sending messages to the machine. And I have to do it with a hub, my MacBook Pro only has USB-C as a USB port.
I tried lots of machine settings, baud rate and a whole bunch of options but it’s always the same thing.
Would the fact that there are two ttys that are created when I connect the machine and not just one pose a problem?
I would really like to buy lightburn, does anyone have a solution to my problem?
Thanks in advance
Xavier