Having issues with burn stopping part way through and only way to get out is to hit the stop button. Also noticed that my laser is not as strong as it was. I need to increase power to 100% and slow the laser down. I finally got an alarm 0 which I cannot find anywhere. I have a Universal Chinese laser with GRBL on a Nannu board. Worked well until the other day so settings have not changed. Any help would be appreciated. Worked
Error 0 is actually not an error it means ‘all good’.
Do you have the ‘console’ selected. There should be other information about what happened to cause it to halt, if it didn’t complete.
Cut the message in the console and past it here. We don’t have much to go on…
Assuming all your settings are correct there are really only a handful of scenarios that would cause this:
- Your laser module is dying - How many hours would you estimate are on the laser? What power level do you typically burn at? Really anything above 85% dramatically decreases the life of the laser and increasingly so the higher the power
- Your lens may be dirty - if you’ve been burning materials that result in a lot of debris or residue this could have gotten on your lens. Try cleaning with IPA or similar. MDF is really bad for this.
- Bad connection - look for a bad connection between your control board and laser module. Your wires may have gotten frayed or burned. Check the connection ends and cleanup if you see any burn marks.
- Bad power supply - it’s possible that your power supply is failing. Check your voltages. Keep in mind that power supplies sometimes only show bad when under load.
I would say this order is roughly in order of likeliness of occurrence.
I’m not sure what’s going on with the Alarm:0. Not familiar with your laser nor do I see any obvious search results.
Thankyou for the recommended tips. I will go through and check out the connections. And try to clean the lens. I only have approx.50hrs on the laser and usually have it around 70%, I checked voltages with the fire button activated and laser disconnected and got around 11.7vdc at the connector to the laser.
Wondering if a flakey controller board could cause these issues. Tried to re-seat the chips but no difference.
It’s possible but isn’t a common failure from what I’ve seen. You could check the voltage of the PWM connector the same way you tested the 12V line. Most PWM works between 0 and 5 V (0% - 100% power). So I think 70% power should register around 3.5 V.
Correct. I measured approx 3.5v. I will try cleaning the laser and it was recommended to lower the baud rate to see if it helps with the program stopping. Will try both later. Appreciate all the help as I am pretty new at this.
Don’t know why but suspecting two separate problems, job halting may be communications problem and after taking some readings suspect laser is faulty. Wondering though if laser would get weak all at once. Any experience’s with this? Thanks very much.
I’ve had one diode go bad and I had easily less than a hundred hours on it but I did often burn at 90%+. Degradation did not seem linear but very sudden. I suspect it’s not necessarily of a slow wearing down of the diode but rather certain occurrences of overheating that dramatically degrade the diode. Or rather, the extreme cases degrade the diode much more rapidly than the nominal cases.
I don’t know if this would apply in your case but there was a well documented issue with grounding on the Ortur lasers that was resolved earlier this year. Basically it was found that because the laser wasn’t grounded that a static charge would build up from stepper movement and environmental conditions and that a discharge would travel through the machine and into the USB ports and cause a disconnect. The symptoms were sometimes a little different but would always result in an aborted job. The laser would stop moving and would lose connection to the computer. No way to recover without a reset. If your setup has been working for some time then likely not the issue unless the environmental conditions have changed somehow. Like you moved the location or modified the unit in some way.
Have you tried connecting to a different USB port? Have you tried looking for an updated firmware for your controller? Is the Arduino Nano what came with laser or this is something you swapped?
Thankyou for your reply. Excellent points you have made. I made some progress as my friend came over and brought his spare laser. Sure enough soon as we plugged his in I could burn no problem. As for the program stopping I am suspecting, if at all possible, that the diode was acting up before it dramatically lost power, caused some type of noise back into the controller causing interference to stop the program… Long shot but Im hoping. Wont know until my new laser comes in. Trying to get a new one under warranty since its only been a month but I think its a long shot. Thanks again.
Try to push the warranty claim. Even if you abused the heck out of that diode you’d expect it to last more than a month. Ask them how long the diode should work and emphasize that you’d kept the power under 80%, not that it shouldn’t support higher power ratings at reasonable life expectancy.
I actually always used it between 55 and 75 % power at speeds of 150 to 450mm/m. but did not stop it every hour. Is it true that it should not run for more than an hour at a time and if so, how long of a break is required?. Do those speeds seem about right or was my laser weak from the get go. If I ran at more than 500mm/m it would not burn.
There’s a lot of voodoo and superstition around this area. And for good reason. Diode reliability is even now a little hit or miss and conditions vary dramatically. Ultimately I think this is less about actual burn time than it is about sustained heat levels. I think for those saying not to run over 1 hour is because heat will rise steadily and longer burn times increase the likelihood of extended run at high temps. For example, you could probably run the laser at ultra low power indefinitely with almost no degradation. So something adequately cooled would likely run for a long time without worry. If you want to be conservative and have no need to be aggressive then by all means run for shorter durations with frequent breaks. That just reduces your burden to find cooling solutions.
I’m not familiar with your particular laser or what you were burning on but if this was for an engraving operation on balsa or birch this feels like it would be on the slower end but not necessarily absurdly so. But for it not to burn at all at 500 mm/min seems weak. I’d expect you to be able to at least mark most burnable materials at that speed.
Thanks appreciate all your advice.
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