A question of speed

[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…