Ballpark Speed/Accel settings?

Community Laser Talk
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Hey guys, first time poster here but long time user of the product.

I have a Chinese 3040 laser I bought several years back honestly just for something to tinker with and have since upgraded it pretty significantly. It’s now got a 40w laser and an upgraded controller. Still using the belt drive x/y axis built on 2040 aluminum extrusion. I mostly do wood engravings on 1x wood for plaques/etc.

Until recently I hadn’t really messed with many of the settings and was running the settings it came with for x/y max speed and acceleration, 6000 mm/min and 100 mm/s/s resepectively. I was messing with some other stuff and decided to ramp it up and whoa, what a difference. I’ve increased the acceleration to 1000 and max speed to 20k and no complaints from the machine at those numbers. I usually do overscan 5% and have a small offset (laser lag) but was able to get clean lines at those settings.

But it for me thinking- there must be a “sweet spot” of sorts especially for the acceleration, or is it really just as fast as the machine can handle? Just wondering if anybody with a similar setup can share what they have theirs set to. Once I’ve got it dialed in I plan to go back and fine tune the offset and what not.

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If the machine doesn’t complain, it’s fine. You can raise the values as high as you want until you notice mechanical instability or other effects.

Though, I strongly doubt that your machine can handle those speeds, especially with a heavy 40W head. So you can command it to run at 20k, but you need to consider that you will need the acceleration space to reach that. And with normal workspace / workpiece sizes, you will never reach that. If you want to reach 20k, you would need 100 mm of acceleration/deceleration distance if you intend to do a 100 mm shape. See this graph, the blue line shows the distance you have at the desired speed.

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2 Likes
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Thanks! That’s exactly what I was looking for. Typically most of my engravings run around 6000 mm/min, so the 20k is mostly just for fun

I will experiment acceleration and see if I can find the limit of the machine