I am having trouble with the connection between my Cohesion3D mini board (on K40 laser) and LaserWeb4. I’m having problems with LaserWeb constantly disconnecting even on tiny jobs. I’ve made sure my USB is directly in the back of my PC(and multiple known working ports), tried 4 different USB cables and the most recent has ferrites on the ends. If I run the job via GLCD no issues(aka direct from SD). The Dell PC (XPS quad core) machine is windows home premium 32bit and I had to manually install the smoothieboard drivers. Any suggestions?
Are you plugging into a USB 2 or USB 3 port? A lot of people are having problems with USB 3.
It’s a Dell XPS 8300, which as far as I can tell is USB 3.0. Is there anyway to get LaserWeb4 to work with USB 3.0?
Several people are looking into it. If your machine has any USB 2 ports try them. If not, try going through a USB 2 hub. I don’t know if that last option solves it or not.
I think I need to open my machine to figure what kind I have exactly. This latest information I dug up says that some of the ports are 1.1 and the rest are 2.0 and some people have optional USB 3.0 (I bought this PC from someone, so I don’t know what they got). I do have a USB 2.0 hub that I could try with LaserWeb also
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USB 3 ports are blue on the inside of the connector…
Thanks for the tip. 
I’ll have a peek at them when I get home from work.
@Tammy_Mink The Dell XPS8300 setup guide says the front and top ports are USB 2.0
I tried the front but no good. My problem may lie elsewhere which I noticed when aligning my mirrors …the simple act of firing my laser (via the test button on the top) is causing my USB to disconnect briefly. Speculation abound that the power supply is dipping off when I fire the laser…so ordering additional power supply and seeing if that is the problem.
It sounds to me like grounding issues.
Please check if your Machine is grounded correctly!
Sometimes the PE in your Power outlet is not enough.
Use the Ground-Terminal on the back and connect it to proper Ground (often something like the copper pipes of your heating system or water pipes will work)
Unplug your Machine and check the resistance:
Ground-Terminal against PE of the Power-Connector
Ground-Terminal against bare metal on the hounsing
Ground-Terminal against the Housing of the Laser-PSU
All of them should be <1 Ohm
In some k40 Lasers i’ve seen the hole for the ground terminal was covered in paint and there was barely any connection between the terminal and the housing.
Also make sure you have no arcing inside the tube compartment.
I.e. black marks inside the housing around the connection of the red wire to the tube.
There are still some other issues wich can cause a behavior like yours. But these are in my opinion the most obvious ones.
@Tammy_Mink take a look at this link… might give you a steer…
I went through everything that was mentioned above and it did “diddly squat”
I had the same problem, all sorted now apart from a little drop out when my big band saw is run up I can live with that.
https://plus.google.com/106553391794996794059/posts/LPPoapfpFir
Thanks, I will check this out, there is a chance I had a power supply issue because even after I swapped out my Cohesion3D board for the stock after a few hours of it going nicely the laser just stopped firing completely, no sign of life in any way. Since the machine was barely 2 weeks old I am going to be able to send it back for a refund because that was not the first issue with the laser itself….as it came with a bad motherboard to start with and they sent me a new one. Long story short, I am getting a whole new laser that is a slightly different model (mostly the same thing but with emergency stop button) from a different vendor and I shall have to see if the connection problems start up again when I get the Cohesion3D board in and using it via LaserWeb.
Just to report back, I got a whole new machine that works much much better, but still the LaserWeb disconnect issues returns. Connections between my smoothieboard and LaserWeb are just super unstable even on small jobs. Seems now that it has been mentioned more that it’s just an issue and I can’t do anything about besides just using the SD card solely, but that won’t work for me. So seems I am left with just tossing my fancy new main board in a box in hopes that someday it can actually be used as fixes and additions are added. I might break out the card if I really want to do gray scale engraving but for day to day guess I am back to stock and CorelLaser.
If you’re willing to try it, grbl-lpc might be worth a try. We haven’t seen as much USB disconnection issues with it.
I could try grbl-lpc eventually but then I lose the capacity to use my GLCD and SD card. Though I suppose it would be an interesting test to go to grbl-lpc just to see what happens with my connection.
@Tammy_Mink have you tried a “data only cable”?
I had loads of drop out and tried data only I have had none since. Did you have a look at the link I posted above… ?
I have very limited drop outs and those are attributed to switching on big loads in the workshop,
I’m not having any of the problems since.