New to the forum and lasers in general so I appreciate the patience.
I set up my rotary (longer ray5) in lightburn i.e Y Steps and I did the Rotary Setup as well. I know homing with a rotary isn’t something that is necessary to do (hopefully i’m correct) so after powering the laser on I manually moved the laser to where it will do it’s thing. “Start From” is set to user origin then I go to the move tab and “set origin”. When I try to frame the piece I get a soft limit warning. I get the same error if I try to jog the laser in the move tab with the arrows. I’m sure I am overlooking something. Any help is appreciated.
One of the problems you might have is if you do not disable homing when machine starts, and trys to home via rotary it will fail (obviously)
Therefore it will error out and probably give you something like Mpos -600x-600
This will cause all sort of problems afterwards
Suggestion
POwer on machine → connect to lightburn
Go to move pannel, and click Get position
Or type ? n console
What values do you get?
Ok I deselected auto home so now it wont on startup
Powered it on, opened lightburn
went to move tab - X is at 0 and Y is at 0
Screen on the laser says Hard Limit
Hard limit means that your initial motion is triggering the switches
You can disable it and should if i am honest
In console type
$21=0
press enter
Retry
As a side note, you shouldnt get motion towards the switches if you are setting your user origin over the rotary which should be i would imagine X200 Y200
remember you must JOG the machine with move buttons before pressing user origin
Moving by hand wont work as machine will not KNOW you moved the frame
Thank you for the info. The hard limit disable makes it work ok but is there a reason why im getting limit errors?
hard limits are literally that
If the machine touches the switches they will error out and stop everything.
Mostly is a security feature from legacy big heavy - finger cutting able - CNC machines.
Not very useful on the little laser engravers
Not sure why they would be enabled by default as they cause problems like that.
Sorry I didn’t word my question appropriately. Why would I get a limit error even if I didn’t touch anything on the laser. Just turned it on, tried to jog in the move tab and got a limit error. I’m just trying to understand why.
Unless you have a electrical noise trigger on the switches, which i would think is unlikely
There MUST be one axis touching the switches. mind you. this might be because they are already pressed as you move the axis to home befoer power up?
You can try to home machine 1 inch away from home X and Y and should avoid it
again, more trouble than they are worth IMHO
Here’s the missing piece of the puzzle: the homing cycle tells the controller where the laser head is, by the simple expedient of bumping it into switches at known positions.
With the homing cycle turned off, the controller does not know where the laser head is. It assumes the head is in the home position when it’s first turned on, then assigns coordinates based on that assumption.
If the head starts out somewhere else, that assumption is wrong. Typically, you can jog the head in only one direction, because the controller knows the other direction will crash into the rail, so it triggers a soft limit error.
A machine without home switches or with homing disabled require manual homing at startup, so the controller knows where the head is and can assign the correct starting coordinate:
Disabling the hard & soft limit checks prevents the controller from checking for crashes, but you’re then responsible for keeping all motions within the machine’s boundaries.
Thank you for that. I’ll be ok keeping them disabled in rotary mode.
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