Hi, there please help. I have been using my laser for about 6 years now. About a year ago I went to burn a item and it didn’t leave a mark on the ply. Went through the settings and checked everything, the S Value Max is at 1000 as it always was and the $30 is also at 1000. Checked everything I could find to no avail. Thought I would try upping the S value max to 10,000 and it worked I got full power and dark burns.
As the $30 is suppose to be the same I tried changing this as well but it would not change.
I have tried in Lightburn and LaserGRLB but the $30 wont let me change it up or down. I can change any other value to any number, its just $30 that seams to be stuck.
So I can burn with the S value max at 10,000 and $30 at 1000, but this doesn’t seam right. Does anyone know what has happened to my machine, or a fix if possible.
Usually this indicates some type of hardware failure. You don’t expect things on your computer to change without you changing them, Lightburn and the controller are no different.
I think you need a better understanding on how these work. Lightburn or whatever grbl software you use creates control codes for the controller. For these codes to be interpreted correctly the code generation software needs to know things, such as what quadrant the machine operates within. The device settings in Lightburn tell Lightburn where it operates so it can generate the correct codes.
The same thing occurs when you tell it what speed to run the spindle, these are generally S codes, such as S500. For the controller to understand what this means it has to know what the range of the spindle (or laser) is. These are set with $30 (maximum spindle speed) and $31 (minimum spindle speed) values within the controller.
If you maximum spindle speed (S-Value Max) is 500 then it knows to run full speed. If the S-Value max is 1000 then the S500 code will tell the controller it should be running at 50% power. BOTH the code generating software and the controller has to know the range of these values for it to generate a code that both software and controller know the meaning.
Hope this makes sense?
Most controllers will allow you to change this and retain it in it’s memory, some won’t.
This sounds like a hardware failure, since it’s been running. You will have to give us more information about what’s going on. You should have done this a year ago when you had the failure.
It’s unlikely a software setting. Hardware breaks, software has bugs.
Do you also run any CNC software that might reset your $$ settings?
I’ve recently had a problem where I had to re-flash the configuration to my controller to get it start jogging correctly again. Not a hardware problem, as we thought…just that GRBL in the controller got corrupted.
