I am new to lightburn. My laser is a 900x1200 dual head 60 & 150 with a Ruida 320 controller. The computer is a current Macbook Pro running 11.7.9 BigSur. LightBurn 1.4.00
There is no ethernet plug on my laser panel. I have a usb connection. I have tried several new usb male to male cords.
When I try “find my laser” it does not find. There is no error message. The laser panel says “DISCONNECTED” The only available setting in the ports is “auto” I have tried to connect the USB cable directly into the side of the controller.
Is it possible that the 320 controller is not compatible with lightburn or with ethernet? When I bought lightburn their site said the 320 was compatible. I have also purchased the lightburn branded camera and am ready to stop reading forum posts and actually start lasering.
I have read a number of ports that recommend using ethernet. Is there a way to connect my laser with the usb connector that came with the laser.
Thanks Marty
If so, you will have to see if the machine can be seen from the OS… You can use lsusb from the command line, you might have to install it… it’s a usb utility…
I have seen a couple of these pop up… I think I would recall if it didn’t work with Lightburn… I have a zip file with this controller… I’m suspecting it’s an RDLC320 type…
I remember noticing that this doesn’t have an Ethernet port… I think it’s this model, my tar file seems to be corrupt, so I can’t extract the user manual…
I found a manual for RDLC320 online and there’s no mention of ethernet. Curious if there’s any thought of making LightBurn bridge compatible with USB connections.
The UDP portion is only going from Bridge to Ruida. Computer to Bridge is TCP. So a translation is happening at the Bridge. I don’t see any reason why a TCP->USB couldn’t be made to happen if the devs were so inclined. I could see this being added if there were a sufficient number of controllers without ethernet.
Also, a similar solution would be required if Bridge functionality were ever extended to g-code controllers although that would require some additional work on the front-end although I suspect not much since IP connectivity was added for some g-code controllers.
I thought it has to be transmitted by Lightburn using the udp protocol… or else my t-link wifi bridge would not have worked, which was purchased from Amazon for $12… Nor would it work when I directly plug it into my pc via Ethernet.
UDP is the messaging mechanism that is a low level subset of TCP/IP and has no error reporting, re-ordering or most of what we expect from TCP/IP.
I can connect three running versions of Lightburn to my Ruida…via Ethernet, they all talk to it, but I can confuse it rather easily… since it doesn’t know or care who’s talking to it…
Conversely …
When I select Lightburn Bridge in the devices, maybe the UDP translation occurs at the PI… I have never gotten a good explanation of exactly what the Lightburn software layer in the PI does… All references that I’ve read from Adam have just mentioned that it corrects some of the UDP problems… and he seems to imply there isn’t any more development going into it… at least at the moment…
I’m sure Adam is busy and I don’t want to ping him over something like this…
I would never argue a usb port can’t be done…
I was always hoping that a .deb package would show up… that way I can get rid of one of the pair of PI’s that I use on the machine and use it elsewhere … One monitors the systems, the other does nothing but be the bridge … I’m sure the PI 4 could easily handle all of it. Or even a PI zero running linux…
I guess I’m still clueless…
In this thread, the usb and wifi options are discussed … with Oz comments… from Jan, '22
Different architecture in that case. Yes, it would be UDP from computer all the way through.
This. I don’t know the exact content of what’s sent from computer to Bridge but it’s done with TCP.
More info from Oz here:
He implies that it’s open to other protocols as well so don’t see why a USB output wouldn’t be possible.
How does this work? Could you run the monitoring software on the Bridge?
I haven’t done any digging into it but I can’t imagine it would be too hard to isolate the Bridge specific customizations from a base Pi OS image. Although that would take away from the appliance-like intention of the product. Also would still limit you to ARM devices at a minimum.
I spent a bunch of time with a PI and an HD touch screen… it was displaying all of the signals, such as status, all of the out ports and anything else I wanted to watch… it was my original control over the air inputs… where I could over ride them or pass them through…
The Ruida looked like a mess with a pair of ribbon cables separated to all the i/o ports to watch the operation… right now it’s in the drawer… Don’t want to put a hole in the cabinet until I want to mount it…
I got it working, not elegantly, but it displayed all the states of the machine, flow rate in l/m, stepper control lines, along with a pretty lame attempt to measure tube current… status, wind… so forth.
The fiber came along (and the temperatures went up in excess of 100F) which limited my co2 work, focusing on the fiber… still focused on the fiber…
My phone is right there, but always forget to take any photos until it’s too late…
I think we all have a puddle of projects that come and go… might die first
