Error 5 pulling my hair out

[SixofClubs (castle)]

Hi I am new to this and learning fast I bought a CNC3-3018 machine I managed to use it for some simple engraving. I then attached the laser. Looking on Youtube I saw a tutorial usingh Lightburn which I have purchased.

I followed the setup instructions but I get Error five. I have read about it and know it relates to homing then some switches are mentioned and I become confused. here are the codes I have.

Grbl 1.1f [’$’ for help]

ok

Homing

error:5

$$

$0=10

$1=25

$2=0

$3=2

$4=0

$5=0

$6=0

$10=1

$11=0.010

$12=0.002

$13=0

$20=0

$21=0

$22=0

$23=0

$24=25.000

$25=500.000

$26=250

$27=1.000

$30=255

$31=0

$32=1

$100=800.000

$101=800.000

$102=800.000

$110=1000.000

$111=1000.000

$112=600.000

$120=30.000

$121=30.000

$122=30.000

$130=200.000

$131=200.000

$132=200.000

Any help is gratefully recieved. It is an interesting new hobby…but frustrating at times.

Thanks
ok

[Blake (Blake Bartlett)]

Let’s try out the search feature on the amazing LB forums!

Hmm… what’s this first one?

Error 5 when hit home

Ray is correct here - It makes life much easier if you include more information, but since I recognize this error, I’ll chime in. “Error 5” is specific to GRBL, and means you tried to run a homing command without having homing enabled on your hardware. Pressing the Home button in LightBurn sends the command to seek the limit switches on the machine to find the home position. You need limit switches installed, and need to have the homing flag enabled. See here: https://github.com/gnea/grbl/wik…

Simply amazing. I hope everyone gives this novel feature a try.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[SixofClubs (castle)]

I did use this novel feature but didnt find it usefull I read the post you pointed out it links to two other links both of which I read. It seems I have to alter the switch but it doesnt explain this anywhere. Sorry if I am being stupoid but I did try and find an answer prior to posting. I wanted a bit of help strange thing asking for help on a forum, quite a novelm idea when you cant find the answer you need or dont understand something. Thanks.

[SixofClubs (castle)]

I think I managed to sort one element of this out. I had it set to home at start up. As my machine is very basic it doesn’t have the micro switches so I switched that off and it seems to have sorted it.

[LightBurn (Oz)]

The homing function tells your controller to seek out its limit switches, and set its home position based on them. If you don’t have limit switches, it won’t work, and you’ll get that error. It’s GRBL telling you that homing isn’t enabled on your controller.

[DougL (Doug LaRue)]

Figuring out what to search for is 80% of finding the solution. Believe it or not, @Blake was helping you out. And well done figuring out that homing operation needs switches and most of the cheap Chinese CNC’s don’t have them. You’ll understand more about why that is as you start using the machine and might even figure out they might be handy to use. Or not.

Isn’t it awesome how much we can learn from searching for answers and figuring out what people are talking about in posts about solutions? I’ve learned a ton about workflow process, machines and software/firmware this way. And it’s not uncommon to go off and do other searches based on the previous search.