I have some weird behaviour with my home built laser cutter. It is currently being controlled by an Arduino Nano running GRBL (I have a Ruida RDC6445S/G on the way ).
Everything seems to be working fine when I do just a cutting operation. However when I engrave and then cut, the cutting layer misses steps at the start of the layer.
You can see from the image below that the bird is engraved ok and in the right position. However, when the job moves onto the cutting layer, the cut starts in the right place, turns on the laser, but then misses steps or something causing the square to be shifted to the right and not cut all the way through.
What confuses me is that when I run the job without the engraving, it cuts just fine, in the right position and all the way through.
What happens if you enable Constant Power Mode? Does the issue go away? If so, it might be due to variable power dropping below minimum lasing power level.
Can you measure the dimensions? How does it compare to expected dimensions? Trying to discern if it’s missing a portion of the line or if something else is going on.
Can you confirm the device is configured with GRBL profile (and not M3 or other)?
The dimensions are 20x20mm which is what theyre supposed to be.
This is the console output when connecting:
Grbl 1.1h ['$' for help]
ok
[VER:1.1h.20190825:]
[OPT:VL,15,128]
Target buffer size found
ok
I think the issue is it’s missing steps at the start as you can see it turn on the laser and stop for about the length of the missing line.
I’m just trying to figure out why its only skipping at the beginning of the cut.
Yes that is correct the short line is shorter than 20mm.
When the laser moves to the start position after engraving, I can see the laser turn on and hesitate for a bit ( It actually causes a dot in the wood that you can see in the photo if you look closely). After hesitating the cutting operation continues on as normal except the square is shifted to the right by the amount of the missing line (The square and the bird should be concentric).
).