Can anyone give me a suggestion how to lower the amount of time this engraving is taking? I have experimented with the settings and the lowest preview time I can get is 57 minutes 24 seconds. That’s at 250mm/s set to Fill Groups Together and with Flood Fill on.
Even with Flood Fill on, it does a lot of skipping around and working on parts of the images or text, leaving out part to go to a whole other section, and then comes back to the part it left out earlier.
For instance, it will do part of the very bottom of the “e” in Home, jump to the “H” on the far left and leave a gap in the middle of it, skip back to the right to do more of the “e” on the right toward the top, then go back to the Oregon state outline and do part of it, then fill in parts of the “m”, and so on… it keeps leaving gaps in the middle of things and then going back. This includes jumping from lower parts of the design to upper parts and then going back to lower parts, as in traversal moves with no engraving time. It seems really inefficient.
I’m sharing an image of the final engraving and an image of the preview as examples to give an idea of what I’m talking about. It sounds like I can sell these to family and friends, as well as at craft fairs and engagements around here, but if they take an hour each, I’m having to reconsider how badly I want to do that.
Line interval makes a huge impact. If your laster dot is big enough to allow you to double it, that’ll half your engraving time instantly. (If you got the extra power, you could un-focus it on purpose and compensate with a higher power setting.)
For (against) the moving around you could convert everything (or parts of it) to a bitmap. Then LightBurn would be forced to engrave it line by line. But tbh, the movement parts don’t look to bad. What does the preview say about how much time is spend on movement?
Funny… I spent a bunch of hours tuning that little machine…, it’d really rip. If you ran a job on it, it would beat itself to death. Finally went back to slightly above the original limits.
I have a 50W Chinese CO2 with a 2 inch focal length lens.
I tried different scan angles and setting it to a 90 degree (vertical) scan dropped the estimate to about 51 minutes (so it dropped around 6 minutes).
It’s at 250mm/s, 35% power, 0.100 Line Interval, 254.00 Lines per Inch. Other than the 250mm/s & 35% power, these settings are the defaults that Lightburn had when I connected it to my laser. I used 250mm/s because when I tried engraving aluminum business cards, I saw some blurring of the text at 300mm/s (although that was before I changed heads and the mount for the head).
The material is the 99.5 % coir, 0.5 % polyethylene door mat from IKEA.
I don’t believe I’m using an image mode. Everything in the Fill layer is an SVG or text from Lightburn. There are no bmps or other images.
I’m not trying to hit a specific target, I’m just trying to see if there is a way to make the engrave fill take less time. The fact that it’s skipping around so much makes me think that there has to be a better way to optimize the burn. If I can’t lower the amount of time it takes, it makes me second guess if I should be making these for sale.
If you were experiencing blurring at speeds above 250mm/s you most likely need to sort out your scanning offsets. With this done you can ramp up your speed and power.
Then on Coir I would increase the line interval to at least 0.2 and most likely back off on your focus a couple of mm or so to give a bigger dot size *as mentioned in a couple of replies above).
When I use these mats I tend to be at 400mm/s @40% power on 50W laser with Flood Fill on.
There’s a lot of discussion about commercially printing floor matts on one of my FB groups and the general consensus is “don’t bother!” Several good reasons have been cited, but durability seems to be the main issue. If the matt is used, the image tends to wear away very quickly.
Keep in mind that you’re not painting the mat, you’re just burning the fibres. Thus the black is basically soot and it’ll wear away in no time at all. The image will remain, but brown on brown isn’t all that easy to read.
Cover the mat with transfer tape on a roll that is the width of the shortest dimension of the mat (alternatively, use a more rigid chip board sheet secured to the surface of the mat)
Run a quick line cut of the design on the surface of the tape / chip board
After you etch them, how to you align the drill holes?
I couldn’t possibly do that with consistancy using a laser and etching.
I prefer an etched board, so please enlighten me…
It looks like it doesn’t currently think your letters are made up of single shapes, let alone groups. That’s a weird fill pattern for sure. Have you tried grouping the letters and shapes differently? (Select the “me” and hit Ctrl-G for example).
Out of curiosity, what do the shapes look like if you set them to “Line”? Do they look like single outlines?
