This is a new one for me. I suspect it’s some kind of hardware issue though I’m not sure how to diagnose. It seems no matter what program I load on my 4’ x 8’ flatbed laser after about 20-25 minutes of continuous cutting all of a sudden my cut patterns will just grossly distort for what seems to be no reason. The display shows the correct cuts when the file is loaded but as it progresses it starts to display these distorted shapes. The controller is outputting these erroneous shapes to the display looking just as they cut. Never seems to happen in the same place. Sometimes it will shift a shape to the point where it will hard limit from trying to cut out of bounds of the cut area. See attached photos. I’ve tried slowing down acceleration settings and speed in general but at some point this appears to just repeat. Has anyone experienced anything like this before? Controller issue? Maybe a stepper driver going bad? Any thoughts on how to diagnose are appreciated.
HMI and LightBurn preview both display correct geometry on file load. But as the cut is happening the HMI switches to real time path following and it shows the distortion after about 20 min. Preview attached.
I can’t imagine why but I’m going to attempt to replicate this with RDWorks to see if it could at all be related to the software. (I doubt it) Beyond that I’m thinking I may have to swap out the stepper drivers or controller. Trying to think of a less expensive way to diagnose the hardware.
Hmm… still going wacky on me. Wondering if my acceleration or travel speed settings are too high now. Maybe belts are getting loose. Seems like after its cutting for a bit closer to the center of the machine it will sometimes trigger a hard limit on the x and stop the job, or it will just start in with wacky cut mode after a shift from where it should be. Is there some kind of crash detection on Ruida controllers where it will try to compensate for an inadvertent bump or something? It seems like the controller is incorrectly interpreting where the cutting head actually is sometimes.
