Lightburn file size concern with Ruida controller

Hello,

I plan to use Lightburn with a Ruida controller with my large format CO2 laser build. In another thread, I read from the user name OZ: “On the other hand, with GRBL or Smoothie, jobs are streamed live, which can be troublesome if the connection drops, but can be a benefit because you can run jobs that would never fit in the memory of a DSP controller.”

My engraving/cutting jobs are going to be extremely detailed and large (4’x8’) and I fear that the Ruida controller might not have enough memory to store my jobs. I had planned on purchasing a Ruida RDC6445G, but upon looking at the specs in the owners manual online it says that the memory capacity is 128M. Because I haven’t actually used Lightburn yet, I have no idea how large the file sizes tend to be for such size jobs that are 4’x8’.

To be safe, should I be looking at a different board or is there a Ruida option that can stream the files vs storing them in the 128M memory? I realize that my jobs are much bigger than the average laser projects, so that is why I am worried about memory size. Any and all advice would be much appreciated.

If it is strictly a vector file you should have no issues, files become large when you embed bitmaps in them.

The only time I’ve seen a vector engraving take a significant amount of memory is when it was a noisy image that had been vector traced, and then multiplied across an entire bed, and even then it wasn’t terribly large.

If you’re doing high-detail photo engraving at large scales you could have a problem, otherwise you should be fine. If you’re concerned, use the trial of LightBurn to produce an RD file (using a Ruida device profile in the software). The RD file is the format sent to the machine, so if you load something and save it as an RD, that’s the size it would be when sent to the controller.

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