Setup my Raspberry PI 3B+ last Friday.
It went just find. I burnt the OS setup and worked all weekend.
Then to day does not work. I don’t even see it on the WiFi.
I have reburned the OS on the card still no go.
Does anyone have an idea on why it is not showing up in the list of Wifi found on PC. If not being list is the issue I thing. Anyone have an idea? I can’t even reset it up because it is not found anywhere.
Bruce
If you re-flashed the OS, it should behave as though it is brand new. You will need to wait for your network router to assign it an IP address after it boots, which takes a minute or two.
Then you should be able to find it as “LightBurn Bridge D23A” (or something like that), connect to it, give it your network credentials, then scan for it.
A common “problem” with the bridge is that if your home network router is power cycled for any reason, it will assign the bridge a new / different IP address, meaning you might have to re-scan for it. You can do this in the 1.0.04 version of LightBurn from Edit > Devices. You’ll see a ‘Scan’ button along the lower-right of the window.
The next version of LightBurn adds a re-scan button for the bridge to the main Laser window, making it easier to do.
Okay thanks a lot.
Why I was waiting for someone to respond here I did not know you were going to be so fast wow that was great! by the way.
I decide to reboot my Router. Then I saw the unit listed. Went through the setup again and it works just find. Save the setting again and re-read them again on my other machine and now it works find again.
Thanks a lot for you help!
So it seems like the Bridge is not fixed then correct.
I now see it is 192.168.1.28. Before it was 192.168.1.41
So does this mean that if you reboot the Raspberry PI that it may get a different IP depending on if one had been released or not. Sot this is why you said to rescan?
So maybe that was my problem then if had a different IP and it was not connecting.
So is that why you have Find My Laser?
What should we do with the LightBurnBridge Just Leave in Turn on? I guess it does not really hurt anything.
Maybe you can explain how it was attended to be use.
One more question. I have two PC that I want to connect to one Thunder Laser.
I have seen that both can connect to the laser but I made sure that only one machine at a time was connected. Is it possible to have both connected? I don’t know why in my case I would do that but I could see if you had a shop with two programmers sending jobs to the laser they would want to do that.
Thanks again for you help.
The intention is that the IP address does not change, so you don’t have to re-scan every time you restart the bridge. Unfortunately making sure that it doesn’t change is out of our hands as it is dependent on each user’s personal networking setup.
For example, even without assigning a static IP to the bridge, on my network it’s very unlikely for that IP address to ever change unless it’s been turned off for a long, long time. IP addresses have what’s known as a “lease time” - basically the amount of time your network will hold onto the IP for that specific device before letting another device have it. Some network routers have a much longer default lease time than others.
That being said, the absolute best thing you can do is reserve the IP address on your network for the bridge. I actually realize now that we don’t specifically mention that in the documentation, which I will fix today. How to do this is pretty dependent on the networking hardware you have. What I recommend is to search for “ reserve static ip”, replacing the BRAND and MODEL with whatever you have and hopefully there should be some good info on how to do this for your hardware.
By reserving the IP, it will never change across reboots.
While technically possible, you absolutely should not do this. The only reason you were able to do this is that the Bridge only holds the connection to LightBurn as long as it’s needed, but then goes back into listening mode. However, while it’s connected it cannot accept any other connections and will actively refuse them. Yes, in theory, if you made absolutely sure that one PC was not trying to talk to the laser while the other one was, it would work - but you could also end up with them trying to talk over each other and cause a variety of conflicts. All the communications were designed with one PC and one laser in mind, so we certainly do not recommend doing this.
To clarify Adam’s point a little, you can have multiple computers configured to use the same laser, and that’s ok. When you launch LightBurn, it will do a quick connection check to see if it can find the Bridge, and it’ll ask the laser, “what are you?” to make sure it’s a Ruida, and that it’s talking.
If you happened to launch your copy of LightBurn at the same moment someone else was trying to start running a job, it might prevent their command from going through, or your computer could report that it couldn’t find the laser, because only one can talk to the machine at a time.
As long as only one person is actually trying to use the laser at a time, it should be ok.
@adammhaile I have my network setup with a static pool below x.x.x.100. That’s where all of ‘my’ stuff lives on the network. My wireless bridge was configured for address x.x.x.13 and it never changed as the router would leave it be.
I had asked support about setting the Pi to a static address and the response was it’s a DHCP device. However I know that I have had it configured as a static device running other code.
I took the same steps to configure it in the /etc/dhcpcd.conf However the current Pi seems to ignore the modifications or get confused…
Just seems like that would be a viable option to be static. I’d feel more comfortable.
Another thing I see when I ‘arp-scan’ my network is that it’s there twice sometimes… ?
Another problem I had was trying to get RDWorks to use the bridge. Don’t use it much and I know it’s a dirty word, “RDWorks” that is, around here but sometimes it’s a viable option when other things don’t tend to work.
Speaking of options, is there some reason I can’t ‘load’ the ‘Machine Settings’ if I’m not connected? I’d like to look back, but unless the machine is up, I can’t load any of the machine configuration files I have saved.
By default, yes. But setting it up as static is certainly recommended to prevent the IP from changing. However, please note I mean reserving the IP on your network router, NOT setting it to static on the Pi. The Bridge is an appliance, and you aren’t meant to change anything on it directly other than the /boot/bridge.json file.
Correct, the Bridge does not use the standard dhcpd service for network management. We have bypassed all of that. We do not support the user attempting to modify the network configuration on the Bridge Pi itself. The way the network is setup is very specific to how we need things to be in order for all this to work. Which is why any static IP setup needs to be router-side.
Unsure what’s happening there to be honest.
The Bridge does not support RDWorks. We use our own TCP protocol between LightBurn and the Bridge that RDWorks doesn’t know anything about. The entire reason for this is to bypass the often unreliable UDP protocol the Ruida uses, except for the “last foot” between the Pi and the Ruida directly over Ethernet.
I assume you mean load from a previously saved backup .lbset file? Not really - it just wasn’t written this way. The load/save functionality came later and it was never assumed that someone would be loading a backup without being connected to the machine. The point was to load and then immediately write to the machine.
You can open the files in any text editor. They are just JSON and mostly human readable.
Thanks… When I get the cable companies modem and router back to them I will configure the router to bind with the Pi mac.
Thanks for the explanation. I have no idea why the Pi shows up now and then in duplicate when I scan the network.
The main reason I was asking about reading a configuration file was that when I am helping someone, I have multiple configuration files, some for the grbl board. I would nice to use to display the information, without the machine running out in the garage.
I will look at the json file… Trying not to learn another language, but I think it might be inevitable.
