A question of speed

[WilliamF (William Foster)]

When I use greyscale the travel speed slows down dramatically compared to using stuck or dither.
Set at 3000 and it looks like drops to about 1000.
I have a fox alien LE 4040 with the 8 bit controller board.
thanks for your help.

[Rick (Technical Evangelist)]

This is worth review:

Grayscale speed

An 8-bit GRBL board can process about 250 GCode instructions per second (ballpark). A 32 bit board like Smoothieware will do 800 to 1000, and GRBL-LPC running on a Cortex M3 (Smoothieboard) will do about 2500. Grayscale produces a GCode instruction every time the laser intensity changes, so if you have smooth gradients, that can be a lot. Running a smooth image with 0.1mm dots (254 DPI) at 100 mm/sec (6000 mm/min) is 1000 gcode instructions per second. If you want to make the output run fast…

[WilliamF (William Foster)]

Thank you for your response…
Looks like I am going to have to upgrade the board.
Any suggestions for an easy conversion from the existing fox alien LE-4040 board and still use the existing steppers and 20 watt laser module?
Thanks.