User is looking for open-source alternatives to Lightburn for Ruida controllers on MacOS. They note that Lightburn has a monopoly because Ruida DSP commands are proprietary and reverse-engineered only by Lightburn. They suggest this is a market gap and propose reverse-engineering the protocol to contribute to an open-source project.
Got a 50W CO2 laser (ruida) and am looking for some open source software to use with it on MacOS. Please don't misconstrue this as me shitting on Lightburn, I'm on the free trial and it's great. It's just expensive and probably more than I need right now as I learn (I'm doing this as a hobby and not as a business). Wondering what alternatives there are. I'm also a coder and would love to work with something open source so I can see how things work "under the hood." Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Edit: So after considerable research, it looks like for Ruida controllers, Lightburn has a monopoly. Ruida DSP commands are a proprietary protocol, and the developers of Lightburn reverse-engineered the protocol, so there's quite lierally only Lightburn and RDWorks (which requires Windows). This is probably also why the Console tab is unavailable on this controller. This is a pretty huge market gap and it's Ruida that's to blame for this. I still have a lot to learn but I will likely begin my own reverse-engineering of the protocol and will document my findings on GitHub to maybe begin an open-source project, or contribute to lasergrbl. I appreciate everyone taking the time to reply.