So if it states that the LightBurn Bridge is not compatible with Gweike Cloud or OMTech Polar lasers. Does this also include the new Monoport Onyx 55W laser? It has the Rudia 6442S.
I’m not following entirely but yes, the LightBurn Software website states that the bridge doesn’t work with the Gweike Cloud or the Omtech Polar.
The Bridge is a Raspberry pi.
I haven’t tested either engraver but the HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces or local Ruida consoles and screens) aren’t installed on these engravers.
A user wouldn’t be able to make the necessary changes to the controller settings (like the static IP address).
Sorry John my question got a bit distorted. I meant to say that if the polar laser will not accept the bridge then my guess is also the Monoport Onyx will not either. This is the laser I just bought and am having difficulty getting it to connect to Lightburn.
Thanks for the reply
Judd
Any documentation or set up videos? Happy to take a look later on.
Some manufacturers ask you to direct the wifi from your computer directly/exclusively at the preset IP address of the Laser engraver.
The issue is that without a console, you can’t change the Ruida IP address… I think both OMTech and Gweike use an ip of 192.168.1.100 the PI bridge expects it to be the original default address of 10.0.3.3
The Ethenet port is on the Ruida controller…
I used to use a wireless bridge to do this. I can’t think of a reason it won’t work for you.
You have to allow for and be able to configure the router/bridge to know that the IP of the Ruida is static.
You might be able to do this with a router you have around if it can be configured as a wifi bridge.
@johnjohn, just curious, this comes up a lot… is it possible to ask if it’s much trouble to have a file on the PI sd with an alternative IP for the Ruida. Many people could benefit from the Ruida software layer Adam has written. Wont’ mention an increase in sales 
?
Is this something for feature suggestions?
I notice less issues with the PI than with a standard bridge.
That’s a really interesting idea. Let me see what I can do.
It looks like the ethernet connection on this type of engraver is for transmitting images only… for the Gweike Cloud at least. See the FAQ section toward the end of this post.
How to use Gweike Cloud with LightBurn + tips, tricks & FAQ
I don’t believe that we have one of these in-house for testing yet.
This is sufficiently off-topic from the original post. I’m going to move it to a new thread.
I tweaked it when I moved the thread. It looks like it’s a No (for now).
You can do this today. IP address is configurable for Bridge.
Advanced LightBurn Bridge Setup - LightBurn Software Documentation
This doesn’t solve the overall issue of Gweike connectivity through the Bridge, however.
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Now that you point this out, I remember seeing it… didn’t dawn on me…
@JohnJohn, seems to me, if it works for images, Lightburn should connect and be useful for sending files to the machine. Even if we can’t do anything else…
I assume images means Ruida code… What else could you do with it…?
I wonder which version they have for firmware… I’m sure it’s got limited memory and these machines seem to have other functions that operate differently than on a regular Ruida…
Maybe someone with one of these, that has added a console, could let us know…
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I honestly don’t get how or why they would differentiate one type of data transfer from another. Seems like that would actually be more work. But it’s likely because the controller is not anticipating having more than one IP associated with it.
If it doesn’t work like the current models … someone had to write some code to handle the difference. That may be why it’s limited… not enough memory for it and the other default operations it does won’t fit in the machine firmware size limit?
We can only speculate… I’m usually surprised, many things Ruida does, don’t seem to make logical sense to me.
Not sure I follow about multiple IP… it only knows what you set it for…
Communications, USB/Ethernet, doesn’t seem to be it’s strong point. Case in point, using UDP… Of course that takes more code…
@NicholasL machine seems to work differently than mine. His firmware is newer, I think, but it seems to operate differently. You can read them from the two links here. They should be in one place…
I don’t think there should be an operational difference like that… you’d have to change everything
If it doesn’t produce a 50% pwm with a 50% power setting, how could you check the hardware?
Someone needs to get there hands on with one of these and add on a console so we can tell what it’s doing.
It’s moving forward… that’s for sure.
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I’m replying to this old Topic to clarify something.
I can now say with certainty that the OmTech Polar does in fact work with LightBurn Bridge.
The only real challenge is that due to Bridge requirement that the Ruida IP be on a different subnet than the wifi network that the default Polar IP of 192.168.1.100 may conflict by being on the same network.
This can be remedied by changing the wifi subnet or by changing the IP of the Polar. The external control panel is required to change the IP address of the Polar.
This also means that the description in the Bridge ordering page is somewhat inaccurate.
I did not test this on an Onyx but it’s likely to work the same way. Gweike Cloud is more uncertain since they use a different board type.
Glad you clarified this. I thought the Ruida was required to be at it’s 10.0.3.3 ip… I had thought Adam stated this…
Thanks
There seems to be conflicting information about this.
I ended up using 10.0.3.3 in this case for convenience reasons but documentation seems to indicate that the controller IP can be changed.
But I went looking for Adam indicating this after reading your post.
Here Adam is pretty clear that 10.0.3.3 is required but it might be only within the context of the Topic. Not sure.
However, in a couple of different places in the documentation it’s pretty clear that this can change.
The LightBurn Bridge is pre-configured to connect to a laser configured with an IP address of 10.0.3.3 . In the Ruida control panel, set the IP of your laser to this value, then connect a network cable from the controller to the Raspberry Pi, and plug in the Pi with its power adapter. If you need to change the IP address, please check out the Configuration Options, and please note the caveats to doing this, listed there.
If the either the Bridge or the laser are not found, you may need to change the IP address on your laser to 10.0.3.3 (the default for the LightBurn Bridge), or optionally, you can configure the bridge to use a different address for your laser.
laser_ip: The static IP address configured on your Ruida laser controller. By default you will need to set it to10.0.3.3which we’ve chosen because it’s unlikely to use this IP subnet for a private WiFi network. For complicated reasons, the IP address of the Ruida must be on a different subnet (the10.0.3part of the address) than your WiFi network. In general, you should never change this value unless this conflict exists.
It’s possible that the documentation reflects something that was at one time planned but never implemented but now I’m curious if this can indeed be changed. I may have a play at this.
Seems to indicate that it has to be on the 10.0.3.X subnet. Seems like you can only change the last octet.
On the Lightburn PI Bridge sales page … it has this
Note: the LightBurn Bridge is not compatible with Gweike Cloud or OMTech Polar lasers.
So now I’m really confused. 
This reading makes sense to me and would clarify an open question I had about how the IP address of the Pi ethernet was selected. Seems like the simplest answer is that it’s just hard-coded to something in the 10.0.3.X subnet.
That’s one of the things I was responding to earlier. Wanted to make it clear that the Polar does in fact work with the Bridge and the major obstacle being the preconfigured IP.
If your reading of the documentation is correct, then the Polar would not be usable even if you worked around the 192.168.1.X subnet.
So to say the Polar is not compatible is fair since a control panel is not a casual buy and not meant to be user serviceable.
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In case anyone is following this Topic.
I put some work into understanding how the Bridge works and to validate some of the initial findings.
- I confirmed that indeed the Bridge is hardcoded with an internal ethernet IP of 10.0.3.1 and assumes the Ruida will be in the range of 10.0.3.2 - 10.0.3.254.
- The default configuration has the Bridge looking for the Ruida at 10.0.3.3.
- However, the Bridge can be configured to work in any other subnet. I successfully configured the Bridge to work in the 192.168.1.X subnet.
- I did not attempt to host both the wifi network and the ethernet network on the same subnet. The documentation is explicit that they cannot be on the same subnet so I’ll take it on its word. I suspect it would be possible to actually get something like this configured with some network shenanigans but I did not pursue it.
Bottom line, looks to me like the Polar could be made to work on the Bridge even without the use of the control panel by making some changes on the Bridge side as long as your wifi network is not on 192.168.1.X range.
I’m not willing to make a detailed HOWTO for this given that it’s going a little offroad but if anyone is interested and is well familiar with Raspberry Pi/Linux and has an understanding of networking concepts I can document what’s required to get this to work.
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