Air assist issue - high air not turning on

LightBurn Software Questions
1

I’m having intermittent issues with the High air assist not turning on. I have checked to make sure the air is “on” in the cuts and layers tab. I start a job and the low air will come on instead of the high air during a cut operation. This leads to flame up and bad cuts…
Also… I’m running a Thunder Nova 35/100.

2

Is this an assist valve you’ve added or was it included with the machine?

We’ve seen at least one instance of a homebrewed system killing the controller’s output due to the valve requiring more current than the internal transistor can handle; it should have used a robust solid state relay. If the laser has an OEM assist air setup, that seems unlikely, but ya never know.

3

Hi Ed! This is the factory stuff from Thunder. There are two indicator lights… one for High air and one for low air. For whatever reason, it SOMETIMES activates the low air, instead of the high air circuit.

4

That rules out a whole bunch of troubleshooting!

To rule out a few other things:

  • Does the same design always fail the same way?
  • If you run the file stored on the controller, does it fail like that?

A new intermittent error like that definitely suggests a hardware problem, rather than a configuration issue.

Do you have a wiring diagram / schematic for the machine or are you on your own with this one?

5

OK, so I got ahold of someone from Thunder laser. Here was their answer…
To correct a number of communication, file transfer, and air assist inversion issues, we always prescribe using SEND or SHIFT+SEND when running a job.

  1. SEND function transmits the entire file to the laser controller, then you must start from the controller using the Start/Pause button

  2. SHIFT+SEND function will transmit the entire file, then remote start the file from Lightburn.

WE DO NOT RECOMMEND USING START. We advise removing the Start button using this option in Lightburn(see image below). Upon a fresh restart of Lightburn the Start button will be removed.

6

Huh.

From what I’ve seen here, the Start operation consists of sending the entire file to the controller with the name tempfile, then running tempfile as you would any other named file.

It’s identical to the Shift+Send operation with a named file, just overwriting the previous tempfile in the controller’s flash memory. This has the beneficial side effect of not filling the file directory with files you probably don’t care about.

Soooo, definitely report back on whether using tempfile solves the air assist problem, because it seems like it should make no difference.

7

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