Lightburn doesn’t seem to cooperate with my ruida controller when enabling rotary.
Its a chuck-style rotary and after getting all the numbers put in LightBurn and click Test the X axis (rather than the selected Y axis) moves appx +1". Then the status at the bottom of the window says “Error: Settings could not be restored to controller after test run”
If I press OK and try to run a job it will hang for a minute or so then run the job normally. If I open up the Rotary Settings again it is turned back off.
Generally speaking, the rotary is not really anything other than the Y axes operation. It seems odd that the control effects the X axes.
I hope you saved the original configuration via the ‘Edit → Machine Settings’ using the ‘save’ option so you have a pristine copy of the vendor configuration.
Lightburn states they support that Ruida, so I’m guessing something else is awry, such as configuration.
It doesn’t seem to have actually changed anything when enabling the rotary, so luckily there was no need to be able to write back.
I opened RDWorks and took a peek at my laser settings, enabled rotary on LightBurn, and checked the settings again. No changes.
So there is definitely some kind of miscommunication between the two.
I still use my rotary by simply scaling the scan interval and the Y axis of the job, but it would be nice to get LightBurn and my laser speaking the same language.
I did a bit of experimenting with it and its more confusing than I thought it was…
If I go to Machine Settings I can read and write no problem. The changes are persistent and just the same as if I changed them in RDWorks.
If I go to Rotary Setup the settings shown there (rotary enabled and steps per rotation) are not the same as in the Machine Settings page, even though the dialog says it read successfully.
If I set the Steps Per Rotation in the Rotary Setup dialog to something like 500, then go to Machine Settings it reflects the change and is 500 steps per.
If I then change the steps per to 600 in the Machine Settings window, write the changes, then go back to the Rotary Setup window the value is reset to the default 360 steps.
Neither one of these has any effect on the movement of the Y axis. No matter what I write the rotary moves by the same amount when I tell it to move 10mm.
Are you using RDWorks 5, or v8? If it’s the older version, I believe it’s just scaling the Y axis output, but I could be wrong. I don’t have a lot of experience with the 320 controllers.
RDWorks 8 doesn’t work with my controller at all, so I have to use 5. Which is fine, they are both equally terrible, imo.
Is there plans for scaling like this in LightBurn? The math is pretty easy – I made a spreadsheet that calculates it all for me. The tricky part is getting an accurate measurement for the Y distance to make one full rotation of the chuck. That can probably be figured out with the machine settings, but I just measured mine with some creative tape and pen marks.
