How do I determine the controller I have?

My dad recently was given a cnc waterjet from work. he was able to scrap it down and attach his plasma cutter to it. He now has essentially a plasma cnc cutter. I recently downloaded LightBurn because I saw that it can covert files to GCode.

The plasma cutter has a windows computer attached to it and my dad he uses it by saving a DXF files to his personal computer and then running that in a program on that same computer called powerstation I believe which turns it into g code. He then saves that to a USB drive and plugs it into the machines computer to run the program.

Im trying to use Lightburn to replace the g code generator that he has on his computer for my computer to build projects myself. Setting up lightburn asks me what controller I have GRBL, smoothieware, topwisdom etc etc.

How do I figure out which type on controller is on the computer with the CNC attached to it?

Is it essentially asking me this to set up a post? My dad seems to think its asking me this info to set up a post for the machine. If so, am I able to select anything and just manually set up and configure a new post to match the one my dad has set up on powerstation?

The controller type determines available features that are presented to you as well as the mechanism used to communicate to the controller.

In most cases LightBurn is used to directly control the controller to run laser operations. For most g-code systems it’s intended to stream g-code commands.

If the plasma cutter has a supported controller it’s possible that LightBurn could control this directly.

However, I suspect you’re going to have to generate g-code and then submit to another program to execute, possibly with some manual processing in-between.

If you end-up generating g-code for manual processing GRBL-M3 is generally considered the most basic g-code device type. Depending on the specific g-code requirements for your plasma cutter other devices may act as a better analogue.

When you connect to the controller with the current software, do you get any messages from the controller?

Else can you take a picture of the controller?

would the controller be the computer set up that the plasma cutter uses?

Just to clarify because I am really new to this all and am not familiar with terminology, the current process that my dad uses to run his programs is

  1. Design project on turboCAD, save file as DXF
  2. Use powerstation to chain path and convert said path then to g code and save on USB drive
  3. plug in usb drive into plasma cutter computer and open and run file.

I was under the impression from watching youtube videos that LightBurn is able to

  1. design project
  2. convert path and turn to g code
  3. save g code to usb

I was thinking I could illuminate the DXF file step.

Regardless, here is what the screen looks like…

For an industrial machine like that the “controller” is likely split up into multiple components which could include the integrated PC. There’s likely something the PC connects to that acts as the central control mechanism. Probably in the form of an enclosed box or possibly an exposed board inside a cabinet of some kind.

In your case a search of “Centroid” brings up a homepage:
CENTROID CNC controls,CNC Controller, CNC Retrofits,CNC Milling Machines,CNC Lathes,CNC Routers,5 Axis CNC Cylinder Head Porting Machines,CNC Rotary Tables,Fanuc Retrofits,Digitizing Probes,Conversational Programming

It’s likely running an Acorn board or something similar from them.

As far as I know Acorn is not directly supported by LightBurn and based on the workflow you’re describing it sounds like it’s a multi-step process anyhow.

In principle this would work. However, the complication is that not all g-code is the same. And LightBurn may not support all the necessary operations that might be useful for plasma. There are definitely some folks on here using LightBurn to create g-code paths for plasma but as far as I know they all do some sort of post-processing to massage the generated g-code to be fit for purpose.

I think 2 keys to this:

  1. examine some of the gcode currently being generated from powerstation to see the types of commands required.
  2. generate some gcode from LightBurn and compare.

You could design exclusively in LightBurn. Depending on the nature of the part it may still may sense to design those parts in something like turboCAD and bring those designs into LightBurn. LightBurn is not a CAD tool.

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awesome thanks for the advice and help!

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