Unlocking the gantry for Manual Positioning, Help

Hi,
I am new to Lightburn and am having a bit of trouble trying to unlock the carriage so I can manually move my gantry/carriage into position to set origin.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Eric

It’s not recommended that you do that, because the controller then has no idea where it is. If you have limit switches, and home when starting the machine, it records the position when it homes, and unless it skips, it always knows where it is after that, and will usually stop automatically if you try to make it do something that would go out of bounds. If you unlock the motors and move the carriage manually, you lose that.

All that said, I don’t think GRBL has a command to unlock the motors anyway. You can set them to disengage after moving, but that’s not good because it’s per-axis, and will happen during a job. - https://github.com/gnea/grbl/wiki/Grbl-v1.1-Configuration#1---step-idle-delay-milliseconds

Thank you for your reply,

I am aware of the dangers but many of us have been using this feature for 20 years in other software so it feels very restrictive to not have this option. Unfortunate.

Best,
Eric

Ir’s not a software limit, but a controller one. If you were to run a Smoothieware based controller on your machine, like the C3D laserboard, that control firmware has a command to disengage the motors.

Understood.

Thanks,
Eric

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