Losing connection with Laser

I have recently acquired a Thunder Laser Nova 24 and have been enjoying exploring both the Laser and Lightburn software.

I am designing projects in Affinity Designer and exporting SVG files to Lightburn where I prepare them for cutting/ I then connect my Laptop to the Laser using a USB cord (Printer style USB lead) and send the file to the Ruida controller.

I have found that I need to connect things up in a specific sequence:

  1. Turn on Laser
  2. Plug USB cord into Laptop
  3. Open Lightburn.
    If I have Lightburn open when I plug in the USB lead the Laser doesn’t connect.

All good so far.
When I try to run successive jobs, I have found that I need to close Lightburn down between each job. If I simply open a new project in Lightburn and then try to send it to the Laser, the file transfer fails.
Close Lightburn down, restart it, open the new file and then send it and the transfer now works.

The Laptop is a Microsoft Surface Book running Windows 10 and I am running Lightburn 0.9.16

This issue is just a minor annoyance but it would be nice to know what the cause of the issue is.

Thanks in advance
Peter

Did you try control + click on the device button at the bottom of the laser screen? It re-initiates the connection. There is also a time out setting in the vendor settings, but I think that is only for ethernet or wifi.

Hi Patrick
Thank you for that suggestion. I wasn’t aware of Control click on the device button. I will certainly give that a try and let you know if it works.

Problem Solved

Thanks guys. The solution offered works perfectly. Only small thing to remember is to ensure no files are loaded in the Ruida controller when you try to re-connect.

Why is this? Can you please explain this a bit more?

Triggering LightBurn to re-establish the communication channel with your Ruida does only that. The files you have sent are unaffected. Are you seeing something different?

Perhaps I explained that poorly. My normal workflow is to:

  1. Plug laptop into laser on USB cord
  2. Open Lightburn and establish connection with Laser
  3. “Send” file to laser. (At this point the laptop/laser connection is redundant unless I want to “send”
    further files.
  4. Open file in Ruida controller and burn job.

At this point, if I don’t escape the active file in the Ruida controller then I cannot re-establish a connection between the laptop and the laser. The file is still held in the Ruida controller (appears in the file list) it just hasn’t been activated.

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