I’m working on a commissioned project. Things were going well. Results were as expected. But then all of a sudden, the text was suddenly reformatting in an undesirable way - ruining parts of the project in process. And subsequently, I found that EVERYTHING was distorted along the Y-axis.
The photograph depicts what was actually printing. I had just completed cutting/engraving the other side and had flipped the items over to engrave the transverse.
Even after restarting Lightburn and resetting / restarting the laser cutter, I could not get it to restore or resolve. This is a paid project which I need to get out to the customer soon.
Probably easier to troubleshoot if everything is off. I think you’re definitely on the right track with it being related to calibration. There was a different Topic posted several days ago about unpredictable calibration behavior.
Do you have a backup of your original configuration you could go back to?
After a bit more “playing around,” (the ignorant person’s guide to troubleshooting), I noticed that when I use the manual arrows on the Ruida controller, pressing “down” (from the upper right origin), the gantry only goes about 1/5 of the distance, but the readout says “500 mm” when the gantry has not actually traveled 500 mm.
Then, I turned off the machine and manually moved the gantry to its outer limits, as far away from the origin as possible (i.e. toward the front of the machine).
When I turned on the machine, the gantry headed toward the origin – but stopped when it had traveled about 250 mm (not the same point where it had stopped coming from the other direction.
I cleaned the rails and the endpoint contact switch surfaces and visually inspected the unit to see if anything could be blocking the rail – but I think I would have still heard the motor trying to move the gantry unsuccessfully if that had been the case.
I also tried reconfiguring the calibration settings and writing them, but no matter what figures I used, it had no effect.
I just don’t know what would make it do that out of the blue all of a sudden. Is it software or hardware related?
There was a configuration file I got once from MWLaser with a machine like mine. I can try to track that down. In the meantime, do any of these screen shots give a clue as to what might be happening?
Thanks, Oz. I’ve been using Lightburn for 3 years now and am always astounded at the power and facility of the program you all have produced (and keep producing).
I think I have a fairly good grasp of many of the features, but I did notice the other day that the rotary option WAS turned on. I don’t know how that happened. I have yet to set up my rotary tool and I can’t imagine any reason why I would have intentionally or unintentionally activated that feature.
Anyway, I’m still stumped, stymied, and panicked, not knowing if this is the result of some settings I may have unwittingly changed or if it is a hardware issue. It all just changed all of a sudden whenit had been working perfectly.
The latest manifestation is this: (1) on the Ruida interface, when I press the up and down arrows (y-axis) I hear a noise like a motor running, but the gantry doesn’t budge. (2) when the machine is off, I manually pull the gantry toward the front of the machine (home is back/right), and when I turn it on, the gantry moves to the right (so x = 0), but it doesn’t stop when it hits the limit – it keeps trying to go farther.
These anomalies make me wonder if it’s hardware or controller related, rather than having anything to do with Lightburn – but if you can help me rule anything else out, I’d be especially grateful because I have some customers waiting for the completion of my projects.
