Home Stretch (I hope)

After adding the Opt Laser to my Shapeoko XL I was struggling with finding a suitable source of a PWM signal on the control board to operate the laser. I think I have solved that problem. Now I need to turn my attention to getting it to work with LightBurn. Since I have only used LB a little, and I am not a native GRBL speaker, I thought I would turn here.

My Shapeoko XL has a 32"x16" work area. But the Laser has come thinking it is hooked up to a Shapeoko XXL with a 32"x33" work area. So, I have been trying to figure out how to set the machine parameters to recognize the area that it actually has to work in. In reality, since the laser is about 4" in front of the spindle, my work area really needs to be set to something like 32" by 12".

I tried editing my device (Device button -> Click on Shapeoko -> Edit -> Next -> Next -> Then setting the X Axis length to 815mm and the Y axis to 400mm. I also set $130=400 and $131=815.

Still, when I go to the back right position and click on “Get Position” in LightBurn, it returns 845 and 850.

When I click on some of the Move controls it attempts to move past the parameters, doesn’t seem to recognize the limit switches, and makes a racket. When I click on home it attempts to move to the left and crashes into the front of the machine looking for the extra 17" it thinks is there

What am I missing?

Gotta get it to zero correctly before doing anything else. It must know where home is and then any moving you do might be more accurate. And don’t worry about size or anything but getting home function to work.

If you are using your Shapoko controller, I would try to leave that stock and from there it should be configurations in the Laser software.

G28 in cNc is home just as G28 is home on the laser.

In the Lightburn device setup, after the page where you set the name and dimensions, the next page setups where Lightburn wants to know your home position is. See if that helps.