I have spent hours going through every post I can find and it seems that when the question of enabling a rotary on an RD644XX comes up, everyone seems to have a 6442G or 6445. Does anyone have a 6442S with a rotary installed that doesn’t require patching in to the Y axis and uses the U Axis directly?
I have an Omnisign Pro 2000 80watt laser running the 6442S controller. I saw the spare U-axis port and purchased a stepper driver to match the existing drivers in there: 2DM556 was the model. Installed it and connected it to match the others and installed a 4 pin socket within the bed area of the laser. So far so good.
Upgraded the firmware to the latest I could find: 8.01.67
Plugged in a stepper motor from a 3D printer I have. Chose a random value of 5000 steps per revolution (no idea why, the motor is unmarked and figured i’d start somewhere). I could use the U axis menu option on the controller to spin/pulse the motor which was a positive sign. I did overheat the stepper as I had the wrong current setting. Whoops! Adjusted that down.
The trouble is, in RDWorks, you can enable the Rotary. But you cannot select which axis to use, and it seems to default to Y axis. In Lightburn, only Y axis is highlighted with Z and A (? why A?) is non selectable. I have seen comments that the U-axis is for a feed roller only. Ok, sure, but isn’t a rotary similar? It is pulsing a motor to move, so why isn’t it selectable?
I have emailed what I presume is Ruida’s website: www.rdacs.com to ask if they can release a firmware that enables the U-axis for rotary, but I don’t like my chances. Has anyone customised/edited/hacked a firmware to enable it?
If the 6442S is purely hardware limited and isn’t physically able to do U-axis rotary, how hard is it to swap this controller over for the more popular RDC6445G that seems capable of doing it? Seems like a take one out, put new in and is only $450 or so.
Figured I’d start a dedicated 6442S thread, rather than the other model numbers that seem to overtake such questions.
I have a G model and as far as I can find it doesn’t support a rotary on the U axes… I also have a separate motor driver… same plans as yours… people have implemented it with a 6445 type controller…
I got some of the same information, like it controls a belt… It could be the logic makes it only available during at the end of the layer… I don’t know either and the manuals they produce don’t go anywhere except how to handle a standard X, Y laser… no mention of the Z/U axes.
As far as I know this hasn’t been done… I’ve seen the control codes broken down but there is a lot we don’t know about these devices.
These are two shots from the Ruida pdf… the one on the left is the 6442g and the right is a 6445g.
Notice the name of the manual at the top and that they appear to use the 644xg connector layout… I think this means a simple swap of the connectors… at least for the controller…
Hmm interesting. If I go down the line of swapping controllers, what is the risk i turn it on and the laser head slams in to the wall on first boot up as it needs the correct parameters?
Before removing the original controller, use Edit → Machine Settings… and save the configuration…
Probably pretty good, but it’s easy to esc out of the boot sequence… on power up.
Install the new controller and again via Edit → Machine Settingsload and write the configuration to the new controller…
That should be it…
Make sense?
The biggest headache is the change out the machine console… it’s physically a different size… I don’t know if the 6442s console will work on a 6445… they have different display resolutions…
If you look at the documents… the size of the panels are detailed there…
