Sit down and have a cup of coffee… This is life with configurations… Eventually you will change one thing and it will all come together.
Let’s go back to something simple.
Does lightburn control the laser properly, meaning will it jog left and right in the proper direction?
You never did answer me about how do you know where 0, 0 is coordinate wise on you table?
When you setup lightburn where did you tell it home was?
When you send the file, in the laser window, what are your ‘job origin’ and ‘start from’ set to?
Any chance you can plug the old controller in and read off it’s contents? I had one I fried the drivers and used it around the shop for stuff like PWM testing and control. I could do all the grbl stuff, it was just the board. It would run off the USB power.
Yes it jogs correctly with the MOVE controls. Had to set $3=1 to get it to work. Had to do that before the board was upgraded to the new version.
I am not sure exactly where 0,0 is. I have been manually moving the laser to the left front where I need for it to start for my burn projects. That was the way it worked before the upgrade.
I am trying to tell Lightburn that the zero is the left front. Not sure I am doing that correctly.
The file shows the green square and the red dot at the left bottom of the art work page. When I change G10, the red dot moves away from the lower left corner, leaving the green square.
This board is the old board, I just flashed the new version of GRBL 1.1h to it.
I will check the computer tomorrow to see if I might have saved the old set up in a file. I just had a thought that I might have clicked the “save” button back when it was working correctly. Will have to figure out how to recall it.
The new board I ordered will not arrive for several weeks, I am thinking. That is why I looked into seeing if I could flash the latest version on the old board so I could finish some projects that couldn’t be done unless I had $32=1 set.
I don’t think Lightburn controls where 0, 0 is, maybe that’s the issue.
I think you should be able to use $10=3 for more position information and assist in being able to diagnose what’s happening.
Seems to me, that lightburn would display the position reported by grbl. There is also a way to allow it to display what it’s constantly reporting.
The idea is if you watch the position reported in lightburn, you should be able to deduce the coordinate system characteristics. It’s not lightburns coordinate system, it’s the controllers. I think that’s part of your problem. If you have any of these set incorrectly, you will have problems.
These guys know this stuff pretty well, take suggestions seriously. In the end they might be correct anyway. I’m trying to determine where is the positive quadrant in your coordinate system.
About the green and red dots. This is from Lightburn documentation Coordinates and Job Origin and states:
The green square in the lower-left of the image represents the Job Origin, and the red square in the same place shows the Machine Origin.
This is what I see. If I tell it to burn the small orange rectangle, the laser burns the large green rectangle about where you see it in the work area and it is four times the size. My work area is 15" X 11". I have watched videos and read the coordinates system and have been trying to figure out what to put in the G10 command to fix it. putting in negative numbers moves the laser to the left front where I want it to be when zero zero is put in with the G0 X0 Y0 command. If I put in larger than X-25 and Y-15 in G10, the head goes to the mechanical stops. I did change$10=3. I thought I had set it that way after reading about it. But just thought I did.
Oz told me that I must use $13=0 mm as that is what the program is working with. It coverts inches for display evidently. Go back to Jul 29 LightBurn Staff Oz Owner / lead Developer. The board must be mm and the program can be either or. I was using mm on the board and inches in the program and it worked fine before I upgraded the firmware to 1.1h. I can operate in mm so might try that. I think my next step might be to go to elekMaker and get them to tell me what setting they put in the board originally - if they even know.
Would it be difficult to do it in mm for a test? I always work in mm, so when I see two things set up differently, I wonder. I don’t think lightburn can know what units you have your controller set to report, but if it expects only mm, then…
You are probably correct, but when I see something about 2.5 times the size I think 2.54 cm to an inch… Just looking for differences.
I think your idea of contact with the manufacturer is a good idea. At least it may get you into the ball park. Might check for user groups for your machine, they may have the information. Usually those machines have manufacturer sites and/or user created sites.
Did you get your devices settings screenshot? We are looking everywhere here…
Hold on to your seats! I loaded the EleksMaker software that came with my kit and booted up. It loaded the old .9 GRBL version into the rom. I copied the setup code out. Checked out the program - had to reverse X and it started working correctly. Then went to GRBL program and uploaded the 1.1h version into the ROM. Started Lightburn and the setup numbers were not even close! The old code numbers were huge compared to the new. So, reset the setup codes to the numbers from the saved old codes. Changed $32 to 1 and everything is now KOSHER. A great learning experience. I know why the box was 4 times bigger because the stepper motor steps were 4 time bigger. So, file this in your “remember when…” and tell the next person to first copy their set up codes out before updating their firmware, but it they screw up like I did, they can recover it - just follow the steps above.
THANKS FOR ALL YOUR INPUT AND HELP!
That’s great you have it functional again. If you read through these posts, it’s rarely a hardware failure, it seems almost always to be a configuration issue. The devils in the details.
When you go to upgrade, generally people don’t think, “I need to backup everything so I can do a restore if anything goes wrong”. When they come here, it never dawned on them to back it up or read a few articles on upgrading. Don’t know how many times I’ve advised that, repeatably. We all do it because we are human. Those of us that strongly advocate it have usually been severely bitten and won’t do it next time because it still hurts
Out of curiostity, while in Lightburn, did you ‘read’ the old controller data via the ‘machine settings’, save it and then with the new firmware installed, write it back to the controller? Always meant to try it in Lightburn, but never did for the grbl controller. I’ve done it for the Ruida.
Glad you’re up and running again… Now you’re the one of the local ‘experts’.
There is a button on lightburn “Save Gcode”. I did that a few months ago and it saved it to a file. I did not think to recall that to see if it included the setup data. I was thinking it was just the project burn code data. I burned one of my projects a minute ago to see if $32=1 stopped the streaking and it did. All is well and I can start working on projects. Now that I have a more powerful laser, I want to try photographs. I watched a youtube video on that process and am anxious to try it out. Will see if I can load the saved code and see what all is in it.
You should be able to read/write the settings from Edit → Machine Settings.
When you save the gcode you only have that which controls the device, not the settings used to create it. One of the reasons there are ‘speed limits’ in the configuration. If you’re running someone elses gcode and it tells you machine to go +x 200 mm at 10,000 mm/sec, might be a problem for some machines. So no, I wouldn’t expect any configuration data to be there as it’s useless and not required to run the code.
Glad you’ve ‘resurrected’ you machine… Take care have fun
I started to run a project this afternoon and I got a notice that my license has expired and I cannot download and run updates anymore unless I renew the license. My program quit working and will not activate the laser and machine. It ignores all attempts to run the project. I thought the program was suppose to still work that I just couldn’t download any new updates. Am I wrong? Do I have to buy a new license every year?
No, a valid LightBurn license will work forever if you have the key. What do you mean, exactly, by “My program quit working and will not activate the laser and machine.”?
I just ran a lan cable out to the garage so my computer doesn’t use the wireless and rebooted the computer. Everything seems to work now and I am burning. I have the key. I am burning out in the garage so I don’t set off the smoke alarms. DUH
