I just went through the focus setup using the Lightburn Focus Test after cleaning all my lens. To do this I had to enable the Enable Z Axis and I enabled the Z-Optimize feature as well. Worked great! Then I manually adjusted my Z height for the veneer I was cutting. But when I went to cut, the normal recipe I use did not even come close to cutting through the veneer and the burn line thickness was huge. Re measured the Z height manually, and I was way off. I Thought I must have bump the button on my boss by accident, so I manually re-adjusted Z and re-ran. Same problem. Then double checked all my settings, re-downloaded the job to the laser, re-adjusted Z manually and re-ran. Same problem! Then I remembered I did not disable the “Enable Z Height” in the general settings. Once I did this everything worked great. Went back and looked at my settings for my cut and the z-offset was disabled in my cut.
So the question is, why does enabling the “Enable Z Height”, cause the job being downloaded to the laser to change the Z-Height even though my cut is not using this feature?
If you don’t also specify “relative Z moves only” the system uses the material height value as the starting Z height for the job. If you have “relative Z” enabled, it only sends offsets from the current height, and ignores the material height value.
I had Enable Z and Optimize z set. But the question I have is how does it know how much to move? The reason I ask, is the cut say 0mm. There is nothing on this screen that says how much to move. The only think of is that I had not reset the system from when I did the Z calibration test.
If you did not have ‘Relative Z moves only’ set then the system uses the ‘Material (mm)’ setting on the main window (under the Cuts list) as the initial Z height. If you have relative Z moves enabled, that value is ignored and the current Z height is used as the starting point. All Z offsets and step-per-pass values are relative to that starting height.
I have spent some time tonight trying to re-create my issue and I can not recreate it. I do not know what I was doing different before. I will continue to pay close attention to this but right now, empirical data, points to user error.
Under Tools->Focus Test. It will shmoo(vary) the height of the cut while cutting a pattern to allow you to determine what the correct focus is for your setup. I always have done this manually everytime I change or clean lens. But this works so much nicer than what I was doing manually plus takes about 1/4 of the time.
