New guy saying hello

[Noah Ferestad]

Hey everyone! My name is Noah and I'm a network administrator by day and all around IT consultant by night. I admittedly know very very little about laser engravers and of course one of my clients has hired me to work on one. The laser is one of those chinese red and black 700x500 machines.

My first time touching it was replacing the board with an RDC6442s after his RDC6442g fried. Now the machine settings are all sorts of wrong so I'm learning from the beginning to get him back and business and support it going forward. Never hurts to add more data to that hard drive in my head and I think I found the right place for that.

Heres the machine: http://imgur.com/a/QVYHDv7

[Pete Cyr]

Welcome Noah.
viewtopic.php?f=100&t=3472
Not the same controller...but may get you close

[Gene Uselman]

Welcome Noah- be careful... lasers are habit forming. If you are lucky the owner will have copied his Vendor and User profiles, as that is the first thing you should do as 'stuff' happens. Our members have uploaded some profiles and if that does not work you can ask for someone with a similar machine to upload a profile. Try to get close to the same bed size and the same homing point as those do differ with the different Mfgrs. They all look similar but many are actually made in small shops in China. If is helpful to try to suss out the brand if it is available. Good luck. Gene

Dang... Pete beats me again

[Noah Ferestad]

I got the settings uploaded but unfortunately I'm still having issues. I finally got all the polarities and limit sensors set correctly but then the home position was way off. Through the panel on the laser I reset the xy axes and got my home position set in the upper left corner as 0/0. Then the issue was when I moved the head to the lower right corner it was only showing it had moved like 60mm. Without changing anything I power cycled the unit, now when it's in the upper left (where I set as home) its showing 10000mm/10000mm. I tried to reset the axes again but instead of zeroing it out like it did before, it starts to move the head. So I'm back to the home location being entirely incorrect.

I can see how one would be addicted to a functioning laser, but youd have to be a glutton for punishment to get addicted to a non functioning one lol

[Gene Uselman]

You have top right home in your signature- is that where the limit switches are? If so that is where it has to home. Forgive us if we get too simplistic for your pay grade, it is often very common misunderstandings that mess people up. If you have the original settings that should still be good- you have to read the controller first and then make changes [or import the settings if you have that file] and then write it back to the controller. We have a member who wrote Lightburn software which makes more sense to us Westerners than the Chinese mindset.

[Noah Ferestad]

Simplistic answers are going to be the best for me as I'm still trying to learn the terminology so everything looks like it's written in greek.

There is a limit sensor on the arm on the left and then theres another sensor on the top right of the machine. I assumed that would make home the top left since that's the only way you can trigger both limit sensors at the same time. I dont have the vendor or user settings from the previous controller since I wasnt contacted until after it fried. So I'm stuck working with a fresh slate. The settings I've loaded have been from similar machines provided in the vendor settings section of this forum.

At this point I need to zero out the head at the top left (home, unless I was wrong in determining where home should be), and also calibrate the distance so it sees the entire bed as 700mm/500mm instead of 10000m/10000mm. I cant for the life of me find where this setting is dictated.

[Gene Uselman]

Vender Settings.jpg

This is where you would set the step length, again, Read, modify, Write. If you readout on the machine is reading 10,000 I think that this setting will not help- I think that means the controller is not reading the position at all. If you downloaded a file from here I would check to see that the home position is the same as your machine. All the machines I have touched home to the right rear. In the User tab the same Read/modify/Write is necessary BTW.

[Noah Ferestad]

Thank you for that. When I read from the machine in rdworks both the user and vendor settings come over identical to the files I've downloaded, so I know that portion is working. But like you mentioned, most machines seem to home top right, so I wonder if the file I downloaded is set for that also. I'm going to search for an exact match and see if that makes a diff. I know my guy has stuff waiting to be lasered so I'm attempting to learn while under a deadline, which is never easy.