Hello all, my 100w brandless black and yellow Chinese laser with a ruida controller is working normally except the laser fires at the same power level no matter what i set the levels to in lightburn. Ive tried to go though related posts, but can’t seem to find anything that helps. the "ammeter’ reads 15 mA when i pulse fire or when i ‘print’ anything. I tried looking in the consol for the $$ settings but my whole console window is greyed out. I am runinng a mac with LB 1.7.08 and ruida. What other info did i forget to include here? I connect with the laser via LAN through my home network but i have to go into my mac settings and manually add the ip address and other ip settings to connect with the laser where my computer things its connecingn with my ‘router’ directly, so i can’t get on the internet while im conneced to the laser, so ii have to switch ‘network locations’ back and forth to access the laser or the internet (not sure that is helpful info) thanks for any and all suggestions.
I think your problem should be split into several sections. If you have a Ruida (DSP) controller gcode output in LB will not be possible, the “language” between the controller and LightBurn is different.
Your network connection to your Ruida also looks strange, try to find the standard documentation from Ruida network installation and get it fixed, it should be possible to access the internet while working with your laser.
Run your Ruida through your home lan. You shouldn’t have to change a thing on your computer to make this happen. It should show up when you scan or identify connected IP addresses as another device on the network.
Since the Ruida IP is static, you have to tell your router to associate it’s IP with it’s Mac address. If you don’t do this, it’s possible that the router could duplicate addresses.
Do you have a voltmeter and a Ruida console on the machine?
Something to check, if you have one of those little digital MA meter’s, some have a dial on them. this is for setting a Power Supply MAX output. I’ve found that mine quits working occasionally and unexpected results occur when it does. I need to unplug the cable, and replug it in to restart the meter occasionally. I don’t use the device for determining power level’s as it’s not accurate. A analog 0-30ma meter is more reliable and accurate.
Lets ignore the LAN issue for now, its a problem im totally fine putting up with.
For the laser power i got to playing with the potentiometer (pot) that plugs into the power supply and adjusts power output on the flly and i found that it doesn’t adjust the power level but it does have have dead spots where it will kill the laser all together. Here are several lines i ran at 1000 mm/m and 2% power and then at 70% power and you can see no difference when the laser is firing and you can also see the dead spots. this wasn’t a scientific test where i slowly and methodically dialed it as the laser burned the line, it was all different spiniing of the knobs. a new pot is $5 on amazon so i figure thats a good place to start?
I have several voltmeters (multimeters?) but no idea how to use them…
You can likely do without the pot, mine doesn’t have one and most bigger machines are lacking an operator power adjustment. Generally all they seem to do is attenuate the pwm signal before it goes into the lps.
I’d just unplug it from the lps and see if you still have issues.
The power setting of the laser is the voltage or pwm on the IN terminal. With a voltmeter, you can just read it off.
i unplugged the pot (the top block) and the little light right next to it turned off and the laser wouldn’t fire. so i guess i have to jump two of these connections? i have a new pot comging tomorrow, so it may be easier to just swap that out, even if i never use it
SOLVED. It was the pot that had gone bad. I followed the wires from the dial back to the power supply and unplugged it and the laser wouldn’t fire so i bought a new one on amazon (link below) and swapped it out. i cut the wires off and soldered then in the same orientation and everything seems to be working perfectly now. I’m going to leave the pot dialed to 100 and then just control the power within lightburn.
