Hey, everyone. I have a Monport Reno Pro, which came with a Topwisdom TL-A1 controller, and I’m not satisfied with the way Lightburn is able to interface with it, so I’m tentatively planning to swap it out with the Ruida 6432 controller. I don’t have any other machine running with a Ruida controller, so I don’t know what I should expect. I only know that using my Omtech K40 with Lightburn was an absolute joy and I’m trying to return to that level of laser nirvana. Before I start hacking, I’m hoping someone with the 6432 can answer these questions:
Is rotary setup done using Lightburn’s nice rotary dialog box, or do you need to go into the Machine Settings dialog and manually pull and push the configuration to the controller every time?
This controller appears to support rotary via its U-axis, but I haven’t seen any mention of users on the forum using the U-axis for this. It sounds like people are trying to do the Y-swap, but that would seem unnecessary for this one. Can anyone confirm that Lightburn can use the U-axis for rotary with this controller (the controller manual says X,Y, and U are all controlled identically)?
Does continuous framing work without the head returning to the origin between each frame? Is it easy to abort continuous framing in Lightburn when you are done framing?
Thanks in advance for any insight. I’m sort of hell bent on returning to the first class workflow I had with the K40, but I want to avoid doing all the work if the resulting experience isn’t going to be much better than what I currently have.
If you look on the left of the image, you can see that each motor has a motor driver between it and the controller itself. Its a bit hard to tell in the image, but the manual does state there is a U/Y/X axis outputs, so as long as you have your own motor driver set up for the rotary, you’ll be able to use the U instead of switching the Y. It just costs the extra motor driver.
The rotary setup window pushes data to the controller for you, and it’s required for each job where your settings change. The TopWisdom controller doesn’t have that ability, so Ruida will be a welcome improvement.
If you’re framing from within LightBurn it should just trace the bounds of your framing box on repeat. My personal Ruida controller has never framed correctly (much to my chagrin) so I’m not the best person to ask about that specific feature, so I hope someone else can chime in.
What @Colin is referencing is the motor drivers. Elsewhere in the manual, they show an enlarged version. Wiring to the motor drivers are the same, the driver itself needs to be selected to work on either a two phase or three phase. The image is for three phase motors. Most of these have two phase motors.
My issue with Ruida, is I’ve seen too many machines where an axes is dedicated to a specific use in various particular models. My firmware works a bit different from @NicholasL Ruida, although the same model.
The only way to know for sure, is if someone has tested what you want to do with that particular controller.
They don’t surprise me anymore, questioned, yes, surprised, no…
Thanks, Colin. That’s the same diagram I found, which made me giggle a bit when trying to use it to find this answer because they don’t connect the Y or U axes at all. I assume that’s just to not dirty up the wiring diagram unnecessarily, but I’ve had some experience where devices have a spot to wire something in but those things aren’t actually functional! Other spots do say this controller does indeed support three axes, though. And yes, I expected to need to get a new motor driver. I’d planned to look inside the Reno and what is being used and just order the same thing to keep everything congruent.
As for your framing not working correctly, that makes me sad. I’m a framing addict, though the red laser dot this machine makes is HUGE and of zero use for any precision (something else to eventually upgrade). How do you live without framing? I have added a camera to mine for positioning, but I still don’t trust it enough to not frame before every run.
I’ve been using LightBurn since before it was available to the public. I have made ways to work around the shortcoming of my particular laser, and my eyecrometers are well calibrated
Thanks, Jack. Regarding your thoughts on specific uses for these controllers, I suspect you mean this controller’s third axis might not be intended for a rotary but could be tweaked specifically to feed a conveyor or something else. Is that what you’re getting at? The manual seems to suggest the U axis is nothing special, but with firmware, all things are possible…
At the end of the day, if I have to, I’ll just hack in a switch on the Y-axis like I did with the K40. It’s still better than fiddling with the connectors.
They never point out what it does. I just know many have had issues using either the Z or U axes.
I have a 6442g that many have had difficulties with a rotary… my firmware seems to operate differently.
Many of these issues, I’ve run across where a company is using one of these for moving a conveyor or something at end of job…
Unfortunately, there is no real English documentation that I know of.
If you want a switch for the rotary, most of these switches are break before make, so it’s no different than doing a hot swap with a connector. Less fumbling, but to the electronics, it’s almost forever..
Yeah, that’s the type of switch I used. The connectors on my K40+ were not the nice aviation connectors like the Reno has. They were plastic JST ones and I knew that it wouldn’t take too many swaps before either the plastic connector broke. It’s less of a concern for the GX16 connectors, but the switch still feels luxurious in comparison.
I’m not sure if there is any precedent for the 6432G model to support the internal re-mapping of Y-axis movement for rotary to the U-axis output port. I could be wrong, but since this model is already an axis short I’d say don’t get your hopes up too high.
