Most DSP controllers have an 'Origin' button on the panel that you press to set the current position as the user origin. The Go to Origin button tells the laser to jog to the position currently set as the user origin. Homing is how your laser figures out where it is. The Home button will tell your laser to execute a homing cycle, where it moves toward the home position looking for the switches that activate when it hits the boundary. If you have a GCode based laser, these buttons will save and run GCode files. If you have a Ruida, these will save and run RD files. The second will load and run a previously saved file. The first will save the current design as a 'Machine Ready' file, in the file format used by your laser.

The next two buttons will change depending on the type of laser you're using, but they always do the same things. For example, a long, thin diagonal shape, or a triangle. This is useful for lining up jobs with irregular shapes where a simple box outline doesn't fit well. For the hexagons file, it would look like this:

The O-Frame button, called the 'Rubber Band Frame', traces a path around your design that is the shape of a rubber band stretched around it.

If my current file was these four hexagons, the green rectangle around them is the path the rectangular frame would follow: This is the smallest rectangle that will fully contain the shapes you're sending to the laser. The first is a standard rectangular frame, also called a 'Bounding Box'. The two Frame buttons are used to preview the position of the job on the laser. The Send button, if your laser supports it, will let you send the current job to the laser as a named file, so you can run from the laser itself.

Stop: immediately abort the running job.

Pause: pause a running job, allowing it to be resumed when you click the pause button again.

Start: run the current file on the laser.

The Start, Stop, and Pause buttons will likely get a lot of use: The type of laser you have active will affect how this window looks, and Beginner Mode will change it too, so don't panic if yours looks different than what is shown here.

The Laser Window lets you select the laser you're using, see it's connection status, send jobs to the laser, and control a few different things about how jobs are run on the laser, including how the job is positioned, and the order things are cut.

Lightburn software 7w laser settings