How to add a cross-vlan device

[xuzhuqi (徐)]

How to add a device when the machine, computer is not in the same vlan.
Computer prompts cannot find laser device

[ednisley]

@xuzhuqi

How to add a device when the machine, computer is not in the same vlan.

If it’s a Ruida controller, the Ethernet interface cannot handle anything other than a simple /24 network with all devices in that subnetwork.

Some previous discussions provide background:

Anyone Know: Has the Ruida Firmware ever been updated to fix their Network Limitation?

Ruida firmware has always assumed a TCP/IP network mask of 255.255.255.0. This effectively required everyone to artificially limit the available IP address of their laser to an address which matches the first three octets of the laptop/PC using the laser. This works fine for folks who have their equipment on a Class C network, but for folks (like me) with a Class B (or Class A) only a small subset of machines on the network will be able to talk with the laser. All Ruida has to do is simply AS…

CO2 Laser using Ruida RDC6445G Controller

Hi Guys, Just completed my own CO2 Laser build, using SPT 100w laser tube with Ruida RDC6445g controller, issue i am having is the laser wont fire using pulse on the LCD panel of the controller, however when i remove the connection block from the main board where motors are connected etc i can get the laser to test using the test push button on the power supply. This leads me to a connection or paramater issue. i followed the wiring diagram from cloudray, Power supply IN to pin number 5 on Rui…

Apparently it’s possible to use a router to bridge between the complex network and the Ruida controller, with the router handling all the fancy vlan addressing and providing the controller with a simple /24 subnet.

The LightBurn Bridge works between WiFI and a Ruida controller, so the firmware may be of some use:

LightBurn Bridge Kit

[evanevery (Ed)]

Unfortunately, Ruida has never fixed their TCP stack…

Fortunately, its easy to resolve by placing the Ruida controller in its very own subnet and then using a very cheap little router to do the address translation between the “compromised Ruida Network” and any other PROPERLY configured network.

You do not need any proprietary hardware/software (lightburn bridge kit) to do this. …and you do not need to change your communication protocols. This works straight up with the default Lightburn TCP stack (UDP) and lightburn just thinks its talking to the Ruida directly (even though its simply pointed at the TCP address for the router)

I simply have the tiny, cheap router stuck to the side of my laser (right next to the ethernet port) using double sided tape. Done.

I posted a very simple solution which is working flawlessly in this thread: https://forum.lightburnsoftware.com/t/anyone-know-has-the-ruida-firmware-ever-been-updated-to-fix-their-network-limitation/151129/9

[ednisley]

@evanevery

posted a very simple solution

I gotta bookmark that!

[misken (Melvin)]

@xuzhuqi

How to add a device when the machine, computer is not in the same vlan.
Computer prompts cannot find laser device

Isn’t that just a simple network setup task? Just configure the router / firewall to allow traffic to/from this IP. If you have different VLANs, then you should have a router already that should be able to handle this.

[ednisley]

@misken

allow traffic to/from this IP

The problem is that the Ruida controller won’t accept traffic from an IP address in a different subnetwork. For example, anything coming from 192.168.1.2 will bounce off a Ruida controller at 192.168.0.3.

If the router can relabel the IP addresses on the fly, then adjusting the source IPs to keep the Ruida happy should work, but … that’s what network admins do for a living, I suppose.