Is it just me or does the software the k40 comes with is absolutely horrible. I didn’t know I wouldnt be able to run lightburn without upgrading the machine. The software it came with never seems to works and makes me not even want to try and use the machine
Now you know why @Scorch created K40 Whisperer and @Tatarize created Meerk40t — two Open Source options that work with the original controller and aren’t the junk that shipped with the laser.
The original software has such a bad reputation that people sell CDs of K40 Whisperer. Would be nice if they would send a cut to @Scorch for writing it but mostly they are trying to prey on people who don’t know that the good stuff is free.
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I agree with @mcdanlj, use one of the open source options as it will be less of a hassle for you starting out.
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I didnt even install the original software. Thanks to this forum, I binned the CD as soon as my K40 arrived and when straight to Whisperer.
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Don’t forget that Visicut( http://visicut.org ) also works with the K40’s M2Nano controller.
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Also, more in line with the original point. MeerK40t as part of the feature set has ruidacontrol which actually would let you control the device with lightburn. It just serves as a emulator for ruida to control the current device.
Also, 0.8.x of Meerk40t is feature rich with a whole design environment etc. But, one of the side-projects over the years was ruidacontrol that got sort of weirdly popular and people have set up guide for how to download and launch meerk40t then run ruidacontrol in console and connect to it with lightburn.
Sometime after the current work for 0.8.x slows down and there’s a full version released I’ll also add in grblcontrol to control the K40 with anything that deals with GRBL.
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I assume you have to purchase the dsp option for lightburn when you use the ‘ruidacontrol’ since it’s generating dsp code … ?
Yes. Though really you could just use meerk40t directly. Version 0.8.x is actually pretty great. And I do have plans to write a pure grbl emulator version just sometime after 0.8.x finishes up. Likely accepting TCP which since lightburn supports that should be a pretty solid methodology there. 0.8.x is in very late stage of beta now, I think there’s a rare critical bug in an edge condition for linux where text objects can be mis-sized and suffer a clipping error. But, everything else works really well (though ruidacontrol actually doesn’t work in 0.8.x).
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Didn’t think Lightburn could run grbl via a network connection… It does with dsp, but I didn’t know it was capable of it with grbl. The Ruida talks in UDP… hence the Lightburn Bridge to help correct for that issue.
Keep us posted…