Sorry if this is yet another iteration of the same issue, but I’m super new with this stuff.
Cr Laser Falcon 10w and M1 Mac OSX 13.0.1 Ventura
I recently received a CR Laser Falcon 10w as a gift, and when attempting to find the laser in lightburn, no device is detected. I’ve tried connecting with multiple USB-C cables directly and through a hub, as well as a USB-A to USB-C cable with a USB-A female to USB-C adapter.
I checked the USB section of system report and there no device listen when the laser is plugged in with the power on. This leads me to believe it is connectivity issue, not necessarily a lightburn issue.
I dowloaded a ch43xvpc driver, and that has not helped at all. Still undetected in lightburn and through system information
I setup the laser manually and it functions perfectly fine, but I’d like to calibrate the camera I purchased for it and am unable to do so because in order to finish calibration, I need to run the target point selection print though the prompt window. Closing the prompt window to do the print manually and transfer it via sd card erases the target markers. Without the laser connecting, I cant burn in the target points, and I’m dead in the water.
I can’t say how you’ll get it working with Ventura but I have two Macs working with a Comgrow Z1 (that uses the same Chinese serial drivers) and LightBurn so don’t give up. The Mac dedicated to the laser is a 2009 iMac running High Sierra. The other Mac is a first gen M1 MacBook Air. The older computer was a pain to get going - same kind of driver issues. I don’t remember all the things I did before getting it to work BUT you should know that the driver won’t even show up in the pull-down menu of LightBurn until the laser is attached and powered up. So do all the installation steps, run LightBurn, then attach the laser. You should then be able to switch the pull-down from Bluetooth to the new serial driver. Then add the laser using mfr instructions. If it’s still not working, try using the Mac terminal to see a list of what drivers are active.
On the camera, I have the Comgrow kit and it has never been reliable.it constantly stopped working until the camera was disconnected and reconnected at the PCB connector. And then it needed realignment to be accurate for a while. In the end I had to learn to do laser alignment without the camera. This is a good head start on aligning your work to any known point(s) in the drawing.
The good news (just in case you don’t get the camera working) is that now that i’m good at the alignment, I wouldn’t bother with the camera even if it worked reliably - except maybe for making use of scraps. I have accurately engraved on a dozen regular pencils at a time using a quickly made jig with manual registration marks. I don’t think I’d do any better or easier with the camera. Good luck!
after changing to yet another cord and usb hub, I can now see the laser in system report. When I hit the find my laser command I can hear the stepper motors kick and the laser lets out three beeps, but the laser still isnt discovered by lightburn.
It sounds like you’re almost there. Have you gone through the procedure to add your laser to Lightburn? Most diode lasers aren’t going to be automatically recognized but if yours is GRBL compatible (it almost certainly is) you can set it up as a generic grbl laser. You’ll have to input some details manually like the work area dimensions and the homing location.
