Lightburn settings don’t transfer to laser

Community Laser Talk
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Hey all!
So we’ve had our laser for two years now (Omtech 80w red and black with a Ruida controller) and only got it fired up and cutting about 5 months ago. Using Lightburn on Windows 11, connected to the machine by USB (if any of this info is relevant).

And we’ve been cutting things! Got the mirrors all aligned, played with some of the settings to cut some VERY simple things from wood and acrylic. I even engraved a bunch of wine glasses on the rotary tool that turned out perfectly!

But we know just enough to get us in to trouble :(. I need someone to explain to me like I am 5 years old, and I will provide whatever info I can (with limited knowledge of the machine and/or software. I’ve suddenly run into 2 issues:

  1. a few days ago I installed the latest update (March 19-ish, 2024)…since then, power and speed settings from lightburn do not transfer to the machine, even though the file DOES transfer with no issues. For each color/type of cut, I get some random speed/power combo (like 381/20% or a speed of 1000+/25%). After much irritation, I was able to manually adjust these numbers on the controller (Ruida, there must be a better way!!), and I got some successful cuts! But I’m still kind of in trial and error mode, and I am still changing the design, so every time I send a new file to the machine, all the speed/power settings change. Is there a setting ive maybe turned off that tells lightburn to send these settings with the file?

  2. I can never get the design location on the lightburn screen to match the design location on the machine…i think it has something to do with the origin, but I’m not sure if it’s the lightburn origin or the machine origin that I need to change; if my design is at the lower right corner of the screen, it cuts on the machine in the upper right corner and mirrored (which I kind of like because I’m cutting acrylic and am kinda digging the look of the design through the plastic). But it would be nice to be able to control that on the software side so I know exactly where to put my material. What am I missing?

Thanks to anyone kind enough to help me out :slight_smile:

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381/25.4 = 15 - an inch to mm conversion.

As a guess, I’d say the values in the Edit → Settings that determine if you’re working in mm/m, mm/s, inches/m … might need to be examined.

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Current working units are in the tool bar…

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Read this and get an understanding of how this works. The better you understand this the more versatile and easy life will be. You should not only read it, but try it… then you’ll get a handle on it.

You configure the software to the hardware. The machine origin is set via Edit → Device Settings, the software configuration. This tells Lightburn which quadrant you’re operating in.

Whichever corner the machine goes to is the machine origin. For all practical purposes you can’t change this.

Basically the coordinate/origin and resulting quadrant works like this.

There are four quadrants in the coordinate system. The origin is in the center.

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Home being right front… operation in quadrant II

quadrant-ii

Home at left back… quadrant IV

quadrant-iv

You can set the origin of the work on the top bar in Lightburn. The job origin can be moved in the laser window.

Sing out if you have issues…

Good luck…

:smile_cat:

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AHA! You’re a genius! I forgot that i had also changed the units right after i updated (first time i needed to use precise measurement!) Thank you thank you!

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