I bought this laser in 2018 or 2019 and barely used it, I couldn’t get it to do anything but put out dots on a surface. I don’t remember its brand but the original board says benbox. I did some reading back then and bought a replacement board - camxtool v3.5, a 3 axis 0.9J USB GRBL board. I also have a shield and UNO if I need to flash it. I know my way decently around 3D printers. Also upgraded the laser itself to an Ortur LU1-2 1600mw. Didn’t get around to trying any of it until now, and I don’t know where the original instructions are to even get it running as it came.
Problem: there’s 3 stepper motors running on the 3 axis plugs and I can’t find any info on getting the Z axis one to move with its’ pair… it just sits there currently, but does move when I tell the Z axis to. How do I pair it up in LightBurn to move with the Y inputs?
Which board do you currently have installed? Note that I believe you can flash the Benbox controller to run GRBL as well. I suspect your two controllers are fairly similar.
Is that a CNC shield? If so, I suspect all 3 of those solutions should be fairly similar. The one potential issue is that if the camxtool is running 0.9J that’s a relatively old firmware and will not support variable power. You could upgrade but there was a pin change in some of the later GRBL releases that you’d likely have to workaround in hardware.
Not sure how familiar you are with hardware modifications.
I want to make sure I understand. Are you trying to use the Z-axis as a secondary Y-axis so that both the original Y-axis and the Z-axis are paired to drive along the Y? If so, is there a particular reason you want to do this?
From memory, this isn’t well handled in GRBL and especially older versions although I’d have to review to be sure.
I have the camxtool installed.
I don’t know a lot about boards, the most I’ve done is used an UNO to flash a 3D printer’s board with firmware, possibly something similar with my Pi at some point. I have pin cables. That’s about it, I’m not set for anything requiring soldering.
Well, the camxtool only has 3 axis plugs, so maybe it won’t work, unless it’s possible to use other pins as the secondary Y. Same goes for the CNC shield, unless the one labeled “A” is the spot. My benbox has enough spots, but they’re not labeled X Y Z, so that’s not super helpful. It also doesn’t have the right connection for the new laser - both are 12v but the new one has 3 pins (labeled for laser, PWM GND), 2 on the old. Though there is a previously unused 3 pin spot on the benbox labeled “S-+” next to the axis spots labeled “B-B+A-A+” “B-B+A-A+” “A+A-B+B-“ “B-B+A-A+“. I don’t think the shield has a spot for the new laser, it looks like I’d have to strip the end off to stick it in this screw connection, which only has 2 slots: -/+. (The CNC shield has much more to it than I expected - which was to be like working with the UNO has been)
Probably not equipped to handle power modulation in that case. You’re better off sticking to the camxtool or use uno+shield.
That’s probably for attaching to CNC spindle. These can work to control a laser for some boards but not sure about yours.
Again, to confirm, is your intent to have 1 X motor and 2 Y motors working concurrently? Is there something driving this approach?
I think so? There’s 3 motors, two on the sides and one on the crossbar mounted with the laser. With only one side motor running it doesn’t move…
Oh I see. So you’re trying to get it to work to your existing hardware setup.
I’m not familiar enough with your boards to say for sure. But look to see if there’s a hardware solution to clone the axis from one to another. That would be the easiest. Typically there would be a series of jumpers that allow you to configure the drivers. I don’t think standard GRBL has a software mechanism to clone axes in software but could be wrong about that.
So ideally, you’d have 2 drivers being driven from same instructions from the micrcontroller. Then the drivers would feed the same signal to their respective steppers. This assumes that both steppers need to move in the same direction. If not, you’d have to invert the motion of one of the stepper. You can do this by swapping the pins for one of the windings.
Alternatively, if your hardware doesn’t directly support axis cloning you could potentially try to feed both steppers with the same driver. As long as your steppers have modest enough current requirements this can work. This would require you splitting the pinout for the one axis to two motors, however. And again, you may need to invert the pins for one of the motors.
Another alternative, instead of having two separate motors on your laser, you could potentially add a drive shaft that transfers motion from one motor to the other side of the Y so that you can run the machine from a single motor.
Happened upon another post with a similar issue, the board he linked looks like the camxtool I’ve been trying to use. Dual y-axis belt drive He had the same initial confusion about the secondary Y axis controller.
I think I’ve figured out the controller plug slots on my benbox should be labeled X, Y, Y2(labeled as the reverse A/B+/- of the rest), Z(unused). So if I can get the S-+ slot to run my laser I’ll be set on the hardware side. On the other post it sounded like GRBL can handle this setup with the Y2 - would it be the cloning mentioned? So this setup is my goal, I’ll be googling how but welcome further help from search terms to how-tos!
If you can get the hardware sorted there won’t need to be any GRBL configuration required. The controller is taking the Y signal and then sending it out on two separate paths to the respective motors.
Take a look at this site for how to flash GRBL. Make sure it applies to you:
HowTo Guide: From Benbox to LaserGRBL (LX-NANO/Nano-328p, CH340, Benbox, DCCduino) · Discussion #1213 · arkypita/LaserGRBL · GitHub
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