Snapmaker ray -- what is the current setup process?

I’ve had a snapmaker ray for around a year. I had it set up for use with LightBurn and made a bunch of things, and then one day it stopped cutting through the same stack of MDF I had been using.

I assumed it was a hardware issue, cleaned it, and fiddled and so on.

No improvement.

After a bunch of random screwing around I decided to try Luban (which instantly reminded me that I don’t like Luban). It cut on the first try.

Ok! Great! I’ve narrowed down my problem: somehow I broke my LightBurn install. So I remove the snapmaker laser device/machine definition from LightBurn and grab the one off of snapmaker’s web site and…no dice. It won’t connect over the serial port.

Fine, I grab the old file out of my backups and diff them, and try changing the communications settings (CommPort, baud rate, and so on), still no dice. sigh Ok, hey! The G-Code preamble is different between the new and old machine definition, so I go “back to the old file”, except I rip out the “maybe bad” part of the g-code, and I get the serial port to connect! Woot!

Oh, now I can’t get LightBurn to have a useful job origin and so I can’t get it to cut without going out of bounds.

So maybe rather then mess around with those two files, what is the “current best practice” for setting up a Snapmaker Ray as if it were a brand new laser?

Instead of trying to setup a new device, are you able to revert to a prefs backup prior to when you started seeing issues? That might be the most expedient method of getting back to a working setup.

Maybe, but that assumes my settings bit rotted as opposed to something in LightBurn no longer likes the previously working settings.

Today’s non-working lightburn setup looks like the one from 145 days ago, but I’m not entirely sure I’m looking at exactly the right files. Where does lightburn store its settings on a Mac?

Newer versions typically won’t affect a working configuration or will attempt to gracefully account for the change. Also, aside from bit rot this could also be something else that changed the configuration.

You can see this in File->Preferences->Open prefs folder.

You can also select a backup from point in time in File->Preferences->Load Prefs Backup.

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