I am running Lightburn 1.4.05 to control my Shapeoko 4 with JTech laser and roller rotary attachment.
I’ve been using Lighburn for about a month to engrave flat materials and everything has been great. Generally very impressed.
I just tried setting up my JTech rotary for the first time. The JTech rotary is connected to the Y-Right cable. I followed JTech’s instructions for setting up the rotary feature in Lightburn, to include the diameter of my rollers and the mm per rotation for my machine. However, the rotary doesn’t rotate enough and all test engravings are compressed (too narrow). I tried adjusting mm per rotation and roller diameter but they don’t have any effect on the amount of rotation.
My rollers are .470" diameter measured with a caliper, and per JTech my mm per rotation should be 80. For testing purposes I put a quart-size paint can on the rollers. The can has a diameter of 4.23" and a calculated circumference of 4.23*3.14=13.28". I marked the can and attempted to move the Y-axis 13.28" with rotary enabled in Lightburn, which I believe should rotate the can 360 degrees, but it only rotated approx. 180 degrees. Thinking the mm per rotation could be wrong I changed it to 40, but the can again rotated approx. 180 degrees. I made other changes to mm per rotation and roller diameter, but the can continued to rotate approx. 180 degrees with the rotary enabled. Curiously, when I disable the rotary and move the Y axis 13.28" I get the same approx. 180 degrees rotation.
It seems the rotary isn’t actually being enabled in the software.
I have read through countless posts and none have helped solve this problem. Any ideas will be appreciated.
I don’t believe you understood my situation. I realize that diameter is not a setting with a roller rotary. I was using the diameter of a known object to test the rotary, and described that testing.
When I use the test button the roller rotates ~360 degrees, but with a <0.5" roller it’s difficult to be sure if it’s right on 360 degrees, hence the reason I used a larger object. However, if I change the mm per rotation setting from 80.00 (as depicted) to 160.00, or to 40.00, I get the same ~360 degree rotation when using the test button. I believe those changes should affect the result of the test, but they don’t. And again, when I place an object of known diameter (and hence, known circumference) on the rollers and attempt to rotate the object one full circumference/360 degrees, I only get ~180 degrees of rotation. Hence, it doesn’t seem Lightburn is accepting my changes to mm per rotation or roller diameter, as they have no effect.
When I was setting up my rotary I found that I had to quit Lightburn and power off my cnc for the changes to take effect. Maybe this will work for you too.
Thanks, Britt. During my frustrating experience I went through several rounds of shutting down Lightburn and relaunching, as well as powering down my machine. I didn’t do it in any systematic manner, however, and it’s worth giving that a try. It’ll be a real pain if I have to do that when making adjustments, and it shouldn’t work like that, but maybe it’ll get me started.
