LaserUser.com Forum (formerly RDWorksLab)

Hello everyone,

im from Germany and have already some experience in CNC-Milling and Lasercutting.
I am the person in charge for the Laser in our fablab.
We currently use a diy 60W LaserSaur wich is in our setup controlled by LinuxCNC with Lasersaur web-frontend.
I also have some experience with K40 conversions to GRBL, GRBL-ESP32, ... (i own two, in our fablab are some more)

Recently we got an old, but working, BRM-Lasers 125x90 with 100W tube and Leetro MPC 6525A Controller.
This is a huge Upgrade compred to our LaserSaur (Linear Rails, Servos, Z-Axis, Blade-Table option, Rotary-Attachmant, Raster-Engravin, more power, ...)
I replaced the Leetro Controller with the new Ruida RDC6445GT5(EC) with 5" Touchscreen.

Initial configuration went well, but the HMI does have some hiccups and a terrible (german) Translation in the current Firmware.
The english language is usable, but as the Laser will be used by many members and guests of our fablab, we prefer a german HMI-Gui.
Our laser will be secured by a custom RFID-Token access control unit, to allow only authorized users to start a laser-job.

I hope i can benefit from your experience with Ruida-Controllers and help others.
I am also open to help RD to improve the usability of this relative new product.

Best regards
Marian

Welcome Marian.Be sure to backup your vendor settings. They are easily lost and difficult to recover..

Hi Pete,

thanks for the advise.
As there are no valid settings for my machine i set up everything manually.
There are just some parameters i have no clue what they affect, but im sure i will figure this out with some help.

I keep a backup of my settings on paper and i also stored them in the controller for easy recovery as well as exported vendor and user files on my pc.

In the FAQ section there is a explanation of how to compare laser perimeters with Notepad++ You might select a machine Vendor file and compare it to yours to figure some of it out.

Hi Gene,

thanks for the tip.
Viewing the files in Notepad give me some corrupted characters.
I tried the Hex-Editor HxD which gave me more readable information.
I am also playing around in Excel VBA to read and parse the file, but i have not yet understand everything of the encoding. The red part indicates the length of the following value including the separator (in this case 8 byte long)
The green part is a counter which just counts up "0F 07" and after that i do not understand the logic.
The blue part is kind of a separator between values. Often it is two bytes long, but not every time.

The files i saved with RDW8.01.54 contain more values then the file i got from here.
Maybe the Controller is different. My controller is recognized as RDC6445S. I'm on firmware 26.01.13, HMI 20.00.02

Using the Touchscreen-HMI i cannot access all parameters.
For example: I was not able to enable the "wind" output. But via RDWorks it was not an issue.

Also the Laser test fire button is enabling the output continuously.
I have no option to change this to a usable value like 50ms.
I am curious if this setting is handled by the HMI or the controller.
I think it might be set via the vendor or user-settings, because in the 6445G Manual the setting is read and written to the controller via buttons.

Any tips or advise where i can find further information?

Maybe i should start a thread regarding this Controller + HMI, because i found nothing regarding my combination.

You are using NotePad[++] right? I have never had a problem with it, and you can do comparisons [with a free plugin].

Yes i do, but it does not show the hex characters in a usable way which are not meant to be ascii.
It looks like this: I also noticed that the files i save with RDworks V8.01.54 via the vendor settings dialogue contain more data then is available in the settings.

I put in unique and recognizable figures in each parameter and analyzed the saved file.
It does contain a lot more values than could be set.
I wonder if there are settings i could change which are not available via RDworks or my Touch-HMI like the laser-test-button duration.

By the way, is there a best practice how to contact RD regarding bugs and optimization? Or better ask Cloudray?
There are quite a bunch of major issues with the HMI.

We must be talking about different things? This is a screenshot of NP++ comparing two Vendor files. I am not sure what you are looking at but it is beyond my understanding. Talking to RDworks is hard/impossible, talking to Lightburn is easy- Oz the creator is a member of this forum, altho he is pretty busy nowdays and does not check in so often- a great guy tho. Ask a question on his forum and you will get a response.

.

Ahh you are talking about files generated by LightBurn
My file is generated by RDworksV8.01.54 I thought as this forum is called rdworkslab it is obvious we are talking about RDworks
I know Lightburn, but don't use it (yet)
I think i will contact Cloudray regarding the issues.
A ~500$ Controller with Buttons not working (jog y up in incremental mode), horrible translation should be worth getting fixed.
Lets see where this is going.

Thanks for your support.

Sorry for the confusion- this forum was formed when Lightburn was a twinkle in Oz's eye- I recall him talking about writing the program years ago [he is/was a member] and while it was a worthy project, I have enough computer/coding experience to have a small inkling of how tough it was going to be. He is a smart and dedicated fellow and I bow down to him... he nailed it.

Actually RDworks and Lightburn both will save the parameter file that will open in Notepad++. I forget if you have a 6445 controller- if so the button in the middle of the directional arrows toggles intermittent/steady movement- may not be what you are looking for but good to know. Gene