It’s been working on my Linux Mint system for quite a while perfectly. Yesterday it went totally haywire and I’m getting this strange anchor point/small square which affects where it starts. If I add a second drawing, it moves with it and resets the starting point to another part of the screen. The starting point used to be user origin, but it starts and stops only at the beginning of the cuts no matter how I set it.
I did try just putting a small box where the user origin is supposed to be as the starting point, then placing the cuts required it to be positioned off the actual work area and I get the the cuts are out of bounds warning, cut anyway and it was not out of bounds to the actual physical work area.
I turned on the homing option, that was a bad idea, it tries to go well past the physical boundaries of the work area.
I can eliminate a hardware and it’s physical hardware software since it does work correctly on my cheap Windows laptop, be it the difference is the Linux system only works with GRBL-4, while the laptop only works on GRBL-3.
Could this just be a simple setting, I’ve tried so many to no avail? I don’t want to have to reinstall LB, it was a nightmare to do in Mint, but I can’t see any other solutions unless someone has options.
If you look in the Laser window, you will see “job origin” with a box with 9 little circles. Those circles represent coordinates for the location of the origin. if you set it in the upper right hand corner your job will be cut or engraved just below and to the left of the location you set as the origin on your laser.
The little green square is the actual location of your origin relative to your work.
That’s helpful. The problem is, it’s not going back to the home or corner position of the work area, it just stops at where the cut finishes. I changed the format to coordinates and set the origin in the corner for it to move out of the way of the stock from, but hardly what I had to deal with, before, and before it was set to the user origin, just as it is with my windows laptop which functions stock as is correctly by returning as it is supposed to.
Let me make sure I know what you want to happen before we go any further. You want to run the job and then have the laser head move out of the way to a predetermined spot, correct?
I am assuming you know how to set an origin point for your machine, independent of lightburn.
Stock it returns to the corner of the extrusion/work area, it stopped doing that, it was doing some very strange things before then I don’t want to get into on this request.
It’s now going through the cuts, and instead of just stopping at the finished point, it’s moving to the center, just below it, stock, like it used to move to the corner but it’s now just below the stock it cut. When I manually move the laser to the side, it begins and ends still just above where it was physically put upon and returns again, just below the cut area, so one inch over, it will start and end cuts one inch over, right above where it’s physically at.
Okay, Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with GRBL machines but I have something for you to try.
Change the “start from” setting in the laser window to Absolute Coords.
Home your laser, run the job and see if it returns to home.
Absolute coords will run the job just as you have it set in the work area in lightburn.
I attempted to just run with it for the next cut anyway, it now starts, then stops and will not power up the laser. I think it’s toast for the install at this stage, it’s cascading failures that’s rather evolving on it’s own, just crazy.
[MSG:M4 requires laser mode or a reversable spindle]
error:20
Unsupported or invalid g-code command found in block.
On or near line 0:
Job halted
Stream completed in 0:00
ok
ok
ok
ok
Waiting to hear back from support along if wiping the install out and reinstalling it, how it’s going to handle registering it again without taking up an additional seat. Showing at least the output as to why it’s stopping at the end of the cut.
it’s now set to absolute coordinates on start up, now onto GRBL 3, and it’s behaving for the moment. I’ll run more tests to see if this is the solution. I did not change squat in any setting before it started acting up, I suppose the grbl 4 finally caved in or something, just odd. Being the only person on the planet running Mint with this, hopefully someone else that makes the attempt on the install runs accross this thread/post.
Annnddd… last nights test proved failure. It certainly behaved along the cuts, but it would not fire the laser to the heat level it needed to be, no adjustments to that and multi passes were working.
Conclusion here being, the software will work on Mint for several months, but one needs to remove and reinstall it periodically. The symptoms of when that is necessary, I’m only sharing a small fraction of them here, basically if it’s gone just completely haywire and you are finding yourself playing whack a mole fixing one thing after another, you are wasting your time, it simply has became unstable, and it’s the basic GRBL code that’s causing the conflict primarily, code I am not about to try and get into, to reprogram if it’s even possible from just a mere software owners version of since this is not open source.
Luckily I have my Windows laptop to use as a back up, this is not for casual use at this stage. Also, along licensing, a paragraph they need to add to it’s front page interface is that you just copy the key to any other computer and it will now be registered, including if you have to reinstall LB as I am doing next. And in addition, you need to deactivate the old license on the box you just redid in order to keep your three seats.
