Atomstack reduces power itself?

LightBurn Hardware Compatibility
1

I have an Atomstack S10 Pro, use Lightburn and have problems cutting 3mm thick birch plywood. Sometimes it works fine, all parts are loose and lasered through and sometimes there are certain areas where the laser didn’t get through.

Now I was watching this yesterday and I noticed that sometimes when the laser changes direction, it seems to reduce the power until it changes direction again. You can see that the brightness in the focus area decreases. When it then changes direction again in the cross-section, the brightness increases again. And exactly these lines, where it seems to reduce the power, are then the ones that were not completely lasered through.

Does anyone know this problem and what to do about it?

2

There is power reduction built into the GRBL motion planner.

Power is reduced if the laser slows going into the corner. The intention is to maintain the the effect of the laser so it doesn’t over-cut.

The effect is exaggerated at higher commanded speeds and GRBL will begin to cut power if the controller can’t clock motion steps quickly enough.

Are you working in mm/minute and what are your Speed and %Power settings?

3

Hello John,

thank you in advance for your quick reply.

Settings: 700mm/min, 85% power, 4 passes.

I will try to explain this to you: If I want to laser out a square for example, then it can happen that in the first pass it runs all edges with 85% power, then in the second pass the power is reduced when changing from edge 1 to 2 and increased again when changing from edge 2 to 3. This also happens in the third pass, and in the fourth pass, all edges are again run at 85%. Edge 2 is then unfortunately not lasered through.

4

I’m not very technical regards the reasons for this happening. I also have an Atomstack laser and my conclusion to this very same problem was, first the grain in the material cuts differently when you change direction, also the air assist is flowing across the cut differently. I just slow my machine down till it cuts all the way through in all directions and save that as my standard setting for future work.

5

It absolutely shouldn’t do this unless it was selected. How was this determined?

There are some firmware implementations that mess this up by losing the default. I don’t recall it being Atomstack though.

Please select File, then Save GCode.
Please upload that file into a reply here.
If the site resists the GCode upload, change the extension to .txt and retry.

6

But the grain of the material should not reduce the laser power. And that this happens is a fact, because you can see that the laser is getting “darker” and you can hear it on the fan, which then turns faster.

7

OK, but that will take until this afternoon, since I’m at work.

1 Like
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so, i looked through the gcode, there is one time the power is set to 85% and then only turned on and off

9

So, I have now tested a little and noticed that no matter whether I have switched the “constant power mode” slider on or off, M4 is always used in the GCode.
With M4, it reduces the power in corners to avoid overburning the corners, and that’s exactly the problem. Sometimes it comes out of a corner with reduced power and only switches it back up to the set power when it changes direction again.
For this reason, I have created an old GRBL unit in the settings that only works with the M3 mode, where it burns evenly with the same power.

Does anyone have an idea what’s the reason for that?

10

This sounds like a firmware bug or potentially an indicator that your hardware is in the process of failing (either laser module or controller). Try seeing if there is a firmware update availble.

Can you upload a .lbrn file where this is happening along with the generated gcode file. Add .txt as an extension to allow the file to be uploaded.

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