Hi,
I’ve somehow messed up the home position on my Chinese 80W laser with Ruida controller. I don’t know how though. When I push home it goes to the upper left corner and tries by force to go further. I’ve tried to reset the machine but no change.
My default home position used to be upper right corner but now it’s somehow upper left, beyond the work surface. All help is much appreciated since I’m terrible at machine controls and such.
Many thanks!
Martin
Try to see if your settings are different, the setting with absolute coordinates is optional and most use it as standard.
Does it travel towards your home switches?
You can’t change the direction for a home operation, that’s internal to the Ruida… I don’t know what Lightburn does when you click home, but I don’t think there is a way to initiate a controller home operation via software.
I’m suspicious it just goes to 0, 0 and I know the origin button reflects where I the head was when I pressed origin on the machines console.
If you manage a factory reset, it would likely break your machine. These are generic controllers and whomever builds your machines sets the values in the vendor settings… The default Ruida factory setting would unlikely operate. You can push the console button to re-home, if that’s what you mean.
What does you machine do when it boots? Which corner does it move to, does the console show any errors and are all the axes set to zero (Z might not be).
Thank you!
The display shows 0,0 when the head is upper left position, outside the work area. When I try to move the head in the X axis back to the right it gets stuck in the middle, just like that’s the maximum distance the machine can travel (which it’s obviously not). The display then show X: 380mm, Y: 0.
Everything is off. I couldn’t do a factory reset due to the password, which I didn’t have. So it can’t really be that either.
The original position is upper right, which also is indicated in Lightburn, both in device info and in the settings.
What I would like to do is to position the head where I want “Home” to be, then adjust the machine to use that for all future as 0,0. It’s been like that all the time but now it’s off. Thanks!
That’s likely the problem.
You can’t change where home is on a Ruida very easily. The home location tells the controller which quadrant it’s operating within.
Then it homes to the upper left, like mine, but it’s not out of it’s work area … it’s in quadrant IV. Where you want to put it is out of bounds.
Set Lightburn to the proper machine origin to the upper left in the device settings.
Ok, it’s quite obvious I’ve got things to learn here 
Just so I get this correct: so it doesn’t matter if the machine always had the 0,0 in the upper right position? Its former 0,0 was a few mm from the edge and maybe 30mm from the upper edge (so that the arm didn’t hit the built in lamp located in the roof of the hood). Can I just change that to the upper left? When I try resetting the machine to default it goes to the left and keeps on pushing towards the wall, doesn’t sound good at all. That happens all the time when I push Home in Lightburn now.
Also, sorry for my ignorance, but what is Quadrant IV?
Thank you for your patience here!
Has this ever worked, with RDWorks or Lightburn?
When you power the machine up, it will move to it’s home position. It must be homing OK or the X and Y coordinates in the console would likely be something like 10000x10000
If it’s actually homing to the back(upper)/left, then that’s 0, 0. So it couldn’t be in the upper right and have a value of 0, 0 for the axes …
You’re giving us conflicting information.
Does it home properly? – You advised it did to the upper/left and that both X and Y values are 0, is this correct?
Where are the home switches located on your machine? Mainly the X axes, one that the head triggers during homing.
Hi again,
I’m probably really bad at explaining—sorry about that! I don’t have enough experience or knowledge about these things to be very specific, but I’ll try again.
As far as I know, I’ve never changed the home position of the laser, neither in LightBurn (I don’t own RDWorks) nor on the actual laser (I believe this is called the Ruida controller(?)). Image of my controller below:
Previously, when I pressed the “Home” button in LightBurn, the laser head would move to the upper right corner, perfectly aligned with my honeycomb. The XY coordinates on the Ruida would then show X0, Y0.
Now, when I press the same “Home” button, the machine moves up to the upper left corner and doesn’t stop even when it hits the metal frame of the hood. At that point, the head starts bumping against the frame for a few seconds (which doesn’t sound good at all—it feels like it’s trying to move beyond the machine’s limits). Once the head stops moving, if I try to move it along the X-axis back towards the right, the machine only allows the head to reach about the center of the working area. Here the Ruida shows X380, Y0.
So it seems like the new home position is somewhere outside the honeycomb (though physically unreachable), and the machine now thinks the maximum X travel is only to the center of the bed. I really hope that makes sense!
This has never happened before. I guess it might be due to something I did earlier today when I had alignment issues and pressed “Set default para”. I thought it would re-align everything, but I was clearly wrong…
Here are my settings in LightBurn:
Here are the settings from the machine:
Mainboard firmware version: RDLC-V8.01.62
I’m so greatful for all your help and support!!!
Thank you! // martin
As @jkwilborn writes, we need to find out where your (machine) home is, where are your home switches/end switches - top right or top left???
When you start your machine now, does it home to the Right Rear corner? Same question for when you press reset on the controller. Is it only the home button in Lightburn that is giving issue?
A couple things I see that might contribute to your issue. You have “invert Keypad Direction” True on X, False on Y and “Direction Polarity” False on X, True on Y. My machine is False on all of those settings.
Hi,
Until now, for maybe 5 year and since start, it has always moved up to the rear right. I can also recall that I’ve read somewhere in a document I received on the purchase, that home is rear right . But now it’s moving to rear left, and even tries to go further then physically possible.
Hi
Not sure what the home/end switches are. But, I can see that there’s a small red box located to the rear right which lights up when I go beyond a specific point (which is now possible due to all this fuzz). Make sense?
No, it doesn’t any more. The home position is, it seems to me, somehow “gone”. The machine doesn’t think the home position is home any more. When I push reset on controller it goes rear left and tries to contiune out, further away than possible, starts pushing against the fence like I mentioned earlier.
I’ll take a look at the settings again when I’m back in the shop. Thanks!
It is quite possible, unfortunately there is no standard in this type of machines/controller. A friend of mine has an 80W OMT, the only (significant) difference to my 60W OMT is the homing position and tube length, it took me a long time to understand his argumentation of his process description, until I saw his machine and could see that his endstops are “reversely” mounted.
The content of your last posts indicates that your machine settings do not match the physical machine you have. If it tries to home in the opposite direction of your endstops, then it is the settings, the machine runs in the direction of the endstops, but does not stop, then it indicates a defective endstop.
Find a backup of your machine settings and import it, it should very likely restore your original settings.
You can try to recapitulate what could be the cause of your problem. Have you updated LB, have you proven or unproven changed/tried something in the settings…
If nothing was done to it, these just don’t re-write the configuration over night, so I would assume some type of hardware failure.
This is exactly why you should not do a factory reset, the factory has no idea what quadrant your vendor has the machine operating within. I don’t think it should be defined, controllers are flexible enough to handle this. It would also restrict what someone dreams up..
Nevertheless, I’d suggest a reload, as @bernd.dk advised… If the hardware is broken, this won’t hurt, if it’s just settings this should fix it.
I’m suspicious other things are happenings… this doesn’t make sense to me, if it doesn’t make sense it’s usually the wrong trail.
