To your point, yes the “absolute coordinate system” that we consider internally are machine coordinate, or MPOS (machine position) as you’ll see it marked in the MillMage, as opposed to the program coordinates, or Workpiece (WPOS) position, which we default to be set with the G54 offset.
So when I speak of homing, or going to the home position, I mean the position that redefines the machine’s absolute coordinate reference (MPOS 0,0,0).
Lightburn then manages all other coordinate references without depending on the firmware (since we have similar functionality for non gcode controllers as well).
However to get the movement correct, LightBurn needs to be told what axis orientation the machine has. I was explaining this to someone else today as well, a lot of purpose built gcode lasers use the machine home position at the 0,0,0 position, but x+ could be left or y+ could be towards the front.
That’s where LightBurn does its axis realignment based on which corner the machine homes to. This works well when the firmware works in the positive quadrant only. And that’s been the majority of our users.
With MillMage coming onto the scene, however, the gcode protocol had to be reworked to also be able to handle negative quadrants. This unfortunately leads to a tremendous amount of complexity on the UI in LightBurn if we need the user to tell the program where the homing corner is and whether or not that corner is in fact 0,0,0 in WPOS as well or if WCO 0,0,0 is offset from that given the homing corner.
The transition is unfortunately painful, and we do apologize for that. But potentially recreating the device configuration without the G54 offsets and the CNC machine toggle on is the simplest way for configuration like yours.
Note that with MillMage you’ll be able to define off you want it to work in G54 or G55 etc instead, so you can potentially simplify your operation mode across packages that way. Using the same origin means you’ll be able to do part of the worth with the laser head and the rest with the CNC (or vice versa) using the same project file.
2.0 is a major shift in many ways, and unfortunately this happens to break the way things used to work a bit more than we have in the past. But hopefully once that reconfiguration is complete, the software will be as reliable and more productive than previously.