I upgraded to Version 0.9.18 the other day and immediately started to notice connection issues.
I have a Thunder Laser Nova 24 and usually connect my MS Surface Book direct to the Ruida controller via an ethernet cable. After the upgrade I could not get Lightburn to talk with the Ruida controller using my normal connection.
I have spent the last two days going through a troubleshooting process. Various combinations of sticking my tongue out and rubbing my belly (Actually changing to a USB Cable/Turning various items off then on again/Changing to a different computer) would result in a connection to the Laser and enable a file to be sent. However, if I altered the design and tried to re-send I would more often that not find that I had lost the connection again.
Today I reverted to Version 0.9.16 and now (for the moment) have a stable connection with the laser. I have used two different connection types both with stable results. Connection A is computer and Laser connected to my LAN, Connection B is a USB cable between the PC and the Laser.
Please don’t take any of this as criticism. I love this software and I am so impressed with the responsiveness of the developers.
Very little has changed in the parts of the code that would / could affect this, so I’m at a bit of a loss as to why this would be happening. Do you have more than one copy of LightBurn running on the machine? (possibly one hung in the background?) That can cause the errors you’re seeing, because a hung copy could have the port open and locked.
I have been working with Mike Carrigan (Thunder Laser New Zealand) on this.
In answer to your question, No there was only one copy of the software on the Surface Book and I have double checked that. It’s also worth noting that I had the same issues with V18 when I had it loaded on the different WIN 10 PC. When I uninstalled that and loaded V16 the problem went away.
However, when I first set the Laser (new machine) up a few months ago I was also having periodic connection issues. This has been a case of trying to eliminate potential causes one item at a time.
If it is not the software then I think the only thing we have left is the controller. But I still come back to the fact that it is working fine on V16 but not on V18.
Try doing a full uninstall of LightBurn, and make sure the LightBurn program folder is empty, then re-install. I’d have to check versions, but there were a couple where we moved forward to a newer version of the framework LightBurn is built on, but we ended up reverting back because it caused a number of problems, including some network issues.
It’s feasible that if you installed over an existing version, that some of the libraries used were not overwritten because you would have a newer version. That’s one of the few things I can think of that makes any sense. Nothing has changed in the networking code in LightBurn for quite a while.
Hi Oz
Ok tried the uninstall again and this time we seem (fingers crossed) to be back to normal.
Given that this occurred immediately after the last update, is it possible that installing new over old corrupts something? For future updates, should I be uninstalling the old version first?
It is possible, but not something we have seen or what we would call common. New releases of LightBurn should not require an uninstall of the previously installed version.