Two lasers - different origins & mirrored files

[ColleenMarshall (Colleen)]

Hello,

I have two lasers set up in lightburn - a 60W OMTech and a 55w OMTech. Both with Ruida controllers (although different versions). I am using a Mac (Monterey), lightburn version 1.0.06.

My 60w has the origins set in the upper right hand corner.
The 55w wants to be in the upper left corner.
I use Absolute Coordinates.

I have tried to change the 55w origin to the upper right, but the machine won’t recognize it.

On the 55w, with the origin set to the upper right, if I draw a square in the left side of Lightburn, the laser will frame the square mirrored on the right side of the laser bed. When I set the origin to Upper left, the square flips in Lightburn to the right side and the laser still frames the square in the same space it did when the origin was upper right. The laser seems to be ignoring what I see in Lightburn.

This is an issue, because all of my files on my 60w are mirrored on the 55w. With text, sometimes they will not flip/mirror back like they should with the mirror feature in Lightburn.

My question is, does the OMTech laser decide which corner is the Origin, and no matter what settings I do in Lightburn, the 55w laser will only recognize upper left as the origin? I was under the impression we could change the origin of the laser through the settings when we first set up the laser, or later in “Device Settings”.

Thank you for your help!

[jkwilborn (Jack Wilborn)]

Hi Collen, welcome to the forum

This goes back to the Coordinate system that these things ‘live in’.

These operate in an unsigned integer mode.

A machine ‘home’ is always where the X & Y axes cross in the photo (red arrow).

One machine homes in the rear/left, so the machine runs in Quadrant IV

The other machine homes in the rear/right and is running in Quadrant III

An increase in X in Quadrant IV move the head right

An increase in X in Quadrant III move the head left.

This is your horizontal ‘mirror’ effect

It would mirror vertically if say one was front/right and the other was rear/right.

You can ‘flip’ (or mirror) a quadrant over to another quadrant… So if the image is in Quadrant IV, anchor the top of the image to the X axis (axis dividing the quadrants) and ‘flip’ it to Quadrant I. It will be vertically mirrored.

Quadrant IV ‘flipped’ to Quadrant II give a horizontal and vertical ‘flip’ or mirror.

‘Home’ is usually determined by the manufacturer. I belive you can change it, since the same controllers are used in both machines. I’ve also tried to help those that have with large headaches from attempting it. I believe they all go it to work but it took outside, paid help to get it to work properly.

Might be worth it in a commercial environment.

Seems like this should be ‘handled’ by the software configuration, but it isn’t… I think it has to do with how the image was created relative to the ‘home’ position. But I don’t really know.

I understand the issue, but don’t know of an ‘easy’ fix. You are not the only person in this boat.