I have a Genmitsu Jinsoku LE-1620. I was looking to engrave a “made by” label for a wood project I had done for my daughter. I had 2 lines of text and was using Fill with the font. When I went to run the the job, it would come up and say “cut may be out of bounds due to overscan settings”. I have had this type error come up before, but I could always run my project and have it work fine. If I ran the job, it would randomly quit somewhere in the project leaving off a letter, only doing the bottom half of the text or just not complete the project without stopping.
I could not solve the problem, so I re-ran the WIFI credit card demo that had text in it. It worked fine without error. I then copied just that text and created a new project with with this text. I ran the job and got the same error of “cut may be out of bounds due to overscan settings”.
I had 0.2% overscan, I tried 0.1% overscan and got the same error message. However, when I did 0% overscan, it worked without a hitch. This leads me to my question: does overscan not work in conjunction with text alone? If this is true, why? Plus I have not found this issue in any Lightburn documentation or in the forum.
Any input would be helpful. Is it possible I have some other setting defined that is causing overscan not to work in conjunction with text?
I’m not sure if I understand the basis of your question. Text with overscan should work fine.
Are you familiar with how overscan works? It’s meant to mitigate the overburning of the start/end of an engraving scan line due to delays associated with the acceleration and deceleration of the laser head. It does this by allowing the laser head motion to start before the actual burn start point and end after it.
By definition, this means that the the area required to accommodate overscan is larger than the area of the object being engraved. The error message is warning that when overscan is taken into account that the laser head is now at risk of going beyond laser boundaries.
So the question is, was your burn positioned in a way that the overscan would indeed put the laser head at risk of crashing? Or if not, what would have caused the software to believe it was at risk?
It was recently discovered, however, that the warning is sometimes repressed incorrectly when both an inbound and out-of-bound object are selected simultaneously to be burned.
Thanks for your response. I am familiar with overscan and I expected it not to be a problem with text as you indicated. The overscan showed it would be 2 mm at 0.2%.
I understand that the overscan is larger than the area of the object being engraved. However, how do I know whether the head is in risk of crashing? There was at least 10 mm around the text being scanned. If you take away 2 mm that would leave more than enough room for the head. Correct?
I always check with frame to make sure I have enough room. Does frame take in account overscan?
My home position is 0,0 so the head is always right at the vector where the x,y meets. Could it be that for some reason that it attempts to go beyond this point and quit?
It has never done this when I am working objects that have text within it like the credit card demo. Only text by itself and it seems to be somewhat random where it quits. The only way I solved this problem was to take overscan to zero.
I plan to try using the center point for text as opposed to the 0,0 point. This might help me sort the problem out. Any suggestions, you have I would appreciate.
What coordinate system are you using? I’m assuming you have no endstops on your machine and is not going through a homing process.
So if you are starting your machine with the head located at the desired start point on the job, then using “current position” for your coordinate system and have the job origin on either of the 3 left positions with just text then by definition you’d be going beyond the bounds going negative on the X-axis which LightBurn does not like.
Frame behavior is always a little tricky because there are known issues with it but no, it should not account for overscan.
The easiest way for you to address this would be to position your laser at the front left when you start your machine. This will put the entire work area into positive coordinates. Then you can position at will.
If this doesn’t work take a screenshot with the scenario setup.
I found it was essentially what you had indicated. I had job origin at the bottom left which probably was the cause. I was using current position. This is when it failed.
I changed to absolute coordinates and it worked. It now requires that I make sure that I have the work surface is where it needs to be before starting.
Separately, I have never gotten the laser to move to the job origin when I use that button. Is there some setting that I need to set to make this work?
Can you confirm the position of the laser after homing? Use Get Position in Move window or type ? in console followed by enter. You may still have something going on if it didn’t work earlier even with the mitigation.