I’m new to using Lightburn. Prior to this, I was using LaserGRBL, which is lacking in a lot of obvious ways. However, with LaserGRBL, I was able to engrave small projects accurately.
Since I switched to Lightburn, my laser seems to have no idea where it is. No matter what settings I change, every time I try to use the Frame tool or just start the program, my laser takes off toward one corner like it thinks the center of the piece is somewhere in the middle of the floor. It hits the hard limits and tries to keep going until I hit the emergency stop.
I have googled so many times in so many ways and watched so many videos and I am just deeply frustrated at this point. And, to top it off, I tried to go back to LaserGRBL tonight for a quick project, and my laser did the same thing, so now I can’t even go back to the methods I was using before to accomplish my work.
I apologize if this has a simple answer, but I don’t even properly know how to ask the question. Things I’ve tried:
changing the bed size
setting the location of the laser in UGS software and opening Lightburn to default that point to 0,0
jogging X/Y and setting the origin (incidentally, this DOES work—“go to origin” goes to where I set it)
all three options for Start From (Absolute Coords, Current Position, User Origin)
all 9 Start From toggle points
changing the origin corner in Device Settings
toggling Auto-home at startup off and on
changing the $10 Boolean
…and probably a few other things. Nothing has worked. I am beyond frustrated. I can no longer use my laser at all. Does anyone know what I’ve done wrong and how I can fix it?
This is indicating that your machine believes that both X and Y homing switches are being triggered.
Is that in fact the case?
You have a work offset configured. I assume this is not intentional.
Let’s remove it. Run this command in Console:
G10 L2 P1 X0 Y0 Z0
Unless you don’t have homing switches you likely want homing enabled.
Run this in Console:
$22=1
Once you make these changes can you run these commands in Console:
$H
$#
?
Then try the jogging controls. Do all controls work as expected? Left moves left, right moves right, up goes up, and down goes down?
If all works correctly, change Start From mode to Absolute Coords, then try framing the job. Does the laser frame to where the object is located on workspace?
So my wife, who is a superhero, was able to forcibly reset the machine settings using UGS software to their original factory specs.
I can now at least use the LaserGRBL software again.
I am not clear on what in the world I did in Lightburn that messed up the internal settings of my machine so badly, but at least there’s a band-aid solution of resetting to factory specs.
I’ve got a project running…I am going to experiment with Lightburn again tomorrow and hopefully NOT break EVERYTHING again.
I’ll let you know the results.
I can’t thank you enough for helping me. I am definitely going to run the commands again before I do ANYTHING in Lightburn just to see what they return.
There’s nothing in LightBurn that will change the controller settings on its own. So you would have gone into Edit->Machine Settings for this to occur.
Don’t run any of these first. Please try as it is first.
Also, please take a backup of your current machine settings. You can run $$ in Console to get a text version of the settings also as backup.
