Test fire access disabled in Lightburn version 0.9.24

Hey their, I’m fairly new to lightburn.
My machine is a co2 laser cutter with a Ruida RDC6442G controller.

I was watching several you tube videos, where in them a macro was added to enable a “Test fire” button to be added to the GUI. When I go to follow the steps mentioned in the video, as well as the steps mentioned in the this post found Here

, I don’t see the same things on my version of lightburn. My version of lightburn is 0.9.24 . The steps I’m following are, Edit → Device settings → ??? Their is supposed to be an option for enabling a test fire button. I don’t seem to have this option. here is a screen capture of what my version looks like.

You may have missed this important part,

“Generally speaking, a test fire button would be on your controller, unless you have a diode laser and are looking for a way to enable for focusing, in which case…”

From our documentation (I made bold to stand out),

Enable laser fire button

Diode lasers often don’t have a red-dot pointer like CO2 lasers do, so it is often useful to enable them at low power for focusing or framing. (Please do NOT do this if you have a CO2 laser, as the beam is invisible and this could blind you or start a fire). Turning on this setting will enable a button and a power setting on the Move Window that allows you to turn on the laser at low power for focusing and positioning.

You have a Ruida controller and that is where test firing is done, using the HMI panel. :slight_smile:

Why are their youtube videos describing how to do this for previous versions of light burn, and why did this feature get removed in this version of lightburn?

I linked to a previous lightburn message board help question post, in which they show a jpeg of where this setting used to be able to be found with in the lightburn software. I also included a jpeg of what my version of lightburn looks like. It seems to me that they are clearly different in feature and function.

I might be reading into what your saying, but are you suggesting that lightburn’s GUI populates / allows or restricts different features based on what controller the end user is using? That would be weird, but I suppose it’s not unheard of for software.

As a side note, what ever the controller can usually do, the Gui can do. Their are some times where the GUI can even access things that the controller can’t.

eg ( I couldn’t access the water read sensor signal data and choose to turn off the reading capability of it from the controller. I can how ever do this operation from the Lightburn GUI.

an example of how things are equal would be the ability to use Lightburn to move the X axis. the Controller can also do this. In other words the controller can do lots of different things Lightburn can access those things and some times a bit more.

To help sum it up, if the controller has a test fire button that can be physically hooked up to it, and it dose, then lightburn the software can also and should also be able to toggle this function.

I hope this helps with better understanding of the communications that go back and forth between your controller and the software that is lightburn.

We did not remove this feature. It is not available for DSP control systems and never has been. Yes, LightBurn provides a very dynamic UI which presents only valid options and features based on the Laser system being controlled. This software behavior is not uncommon. As an example, there would not be color printing options presented in software for an application that does not have a color print driver installed. Or Right to Left text production without international language support installed.

As for your understanding of what is addressable through API’s and or decoding the motion control protocol for a given controller, there are things that are not surfaced and available to control via software. In other cases, we choose not to provide access or create a function for something as we consider it to be unsafe. ‘Remote Job Monitoring’ would be one that we could do, but won’t because we have seen to many house fires and need to sleep at night. :wink:

LightBurn supports a growing number of laser systems, which at times, requires different control points, features and functions to support these diverse systems. The LightBurn UI is designed to accommodate these needs while not presenting non-relevant options for the current hardware profile being used.

This is not entirely correct. Some features provided within a motion control system are only available through the HMI panel and not addressable through software. We may not have the options you assume are provided from the motion control system.

We do not and have not provided a test fire button for DSP control systems. The LightBurn videos you may have seen are talking about a different motion control setup (GCode), using different laser technology (Diode - human visible beam), requiring similar but different solutions.

OK, Thank you for your help, and your further explanation. This helps me a bunch. :slight_smile:

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