I use a Shapeoko with a J-tech laser. How do I use saved positions? I can save them but have been unable to go back and use them. I made a vacuum table to hold down my stock which is bolted down to the spoil board at a specific X,Y location. I want to Laser engrave and then using router cut out wooden ornaments.
You just click the drop-down, select a position from the list, and the laser jogs there.
I could not seem to get that to work and now my laptop is busy updating windows so I will have to try later. The coordinates saved were both negative numbers if that has any effect.
If they’re negative, they won’t work, and it means that your controller is not set up correctly for use with LightBurn.
When you home your machine, because it’s set up for CNC use, not laser use, it sets the zero point to the rear-right, with the workspace being in negative space, instead of setting zero to front-left, with the workspace being in positive space. On a CNC, the assumption is that you’ll then jog to the corner of your workpiece and set your workspace origin from that.
In LightBurn, you essentially do the same thing, but the “workpiece” is your entire workspace. You can jog to the front-left and enter G92 X0 Y0 in the console to set that as zero, or you can set up a macro that applies the known offset, like this:
G10 L2 P1 X-750 Y-750
That assumes that your machine has 750mm of travel on each axis, so you might need to change those. You also need:
$10=0
$32=1
The first line changes the reporting to be in workspace instead of machine space, and the second line enables laser mode. If you set up your X-Carve with a relatively recent version of LightBurn, it should’ve created a pair of macros for you to do this already. If you set it up with an older release, you would need to make those manually.
This is all documented here: https://lightburnsoftware.github.io/NewDocs/CommonGrblSetups.html
Spent an hour driving it around the waste board and came to the conclusion that I did not have $10 set correctly. It has to be swapped for the Carbide Motion to display the position, and back for Lightburn to know where it is. Its now doing what I expect.
Yes, the auto-setup creates two macros, one for “Use Laser” that does the offset, sets $10=0 and $32=1, and one for “Use CNC” that puts them all back to whatever they were before.
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