Any Diode Laser machines Incompatible with Lightburn?

[JBrondos (Joel Brondos)]

I was surprised to find out at the Lightburn conference that there are some major CO2 laser companies which produce machines which are not compatible with Lightburn.

Are there any DIODE lasers which are NOT compatible with Lightburn?

Does a diode laser take a different version of Lightburn than the version which runs a CO2 Ruida controller?

[LSS (Samuli Samuelsson)]

Hi.

@JBrondos

I was surprised to find out at the Lightburn conference that there are some major CO2 laser companies which produce machines which are not compatible with Lightburn.

That’s IMO not surprising at all.
In the rather recent past every manufacturer had their “own” controlling software/firmware on a plethora of controllers driving any machines even remotely related to CNC.
Ditching the old system and/or having multiple different controlling systems that are incompatible with eachother available isn’t commercially feasible, or wise.
But, in that very same rather recent past -for us old timers at least- there was also very few hobby level CNC routers available, and definitely no diode laser routers/cutters.

I’d be willing to bet that most (recent) hobby level CO2 machines can be made compatible with LB, most of the industrial level machines can’t.

Most “real” industrial scale CNC machines rely on direct or indirect closed loop position feedback for obvious reasons, hobby machines generally do not have that feature.
AFAIK GRBL does not support closed loop operation, but I may well be wrong about that.

@JBrondos

Are there any DIODE lasers which are NOT compatible with Lightburn?

Xtool diode lasers (perhaps CO2’s as well?) with their GRBLish contoller/firmware are not compatible with LB straight out of the box.
XTool however provides a special LB configuration file that allows their basic lasers to be used with LB.
Some of the XTools more recent offerings also have some advanced features that are not supported (at least not yet) in LB.
But that’s bound to happen in any software/hardware developement if they’re not tied closely together in some shape or form.

I’m pretty sure that there’s other such examples out there.
Given the LBs status as the #1 low power laser CAD/CAM software, I’d say that insisting on incompatibility with LB for any reason what so ever would be a rather swift commercial suicide.

Regards,
Sam