I’ve got a complex map that I’m trying to burn on thin plywood with a 5W Longer RAY5 diode laser.
When I try to burn the image the Longer RAY5 says “File is more than 1M. Do you want to continue?”. I hit continue and it mostly works. Here’s a picture of the burn and the preview. Notice that I lose some lines in the top-right quadrant of the burn. Is this a result of my file size? Is there something else going on that causes this near the end of the burn?
The gcode file is over 3MB, which is large compared to most of my projects. Is the complexity my problem? Any suggestions on how to reduce the size or complexity?
I pulled the map from Snazzy Maps - Free Styles for Google Maps and used the “roads by Jessica” map style. I tried various settings in LightBurn from tracing it to keeping it as an image layer and using Threshold mode to get it to pure black.
The original map is in PNG format but I can convert it to nearly anything. I think the fact that there are so many streets makes it a lot of gcode.
I noticed in another thread that I can export the gcode and then I can load that into LightBurn as a vector file. That helps me confirm that LightBurn is probably doing everything correctly. The data is in the gcode but, for some reason, it isn’t coming out on the edges of the burn.
This is silly to say, but it feels a little bit like the laser gets “tired”. Re-phrasing it that way is making me think the files size really is the problem. My guess is that the little ESP32 in this machine either can’t keep up or doesn’t have enough memory and so some detail is getting lost.
What happens if you run it directly from the PC rather than from a card?
This way, the laser controller doesn’t need to do as much work. It just passes thru the data stream relatively unprocessed as it’s trickled in, rather than (I assume) trying to load some or all of the GC file into memory that may or may not be sufficient size.
These ran fine with a 16mHz Arduino processor… An esp32 runs at ~230mHz.
The mechanics of a cnc machine take eons compared to the speed of even the slowest style of micro-controller…
These controllers spend more time waiting for the mechanics to move then anything else.
These is little to no computing or storage required by these controllers, unless you want to look at it like an sd card. All grbl are generally streamed, same with an sd card. There are only a few commands loaded into the controller at any one time…
The controller is not doing any real computations…
@berainlb advised, I’d suggest using a vector file… I couldn’t get the site to produce any output for me…
