Thanks!
I would say you have mechanical issues. Loose belts, loose set screws on drive pullies, couplers.
What’s the rule of thumb on how tight and loose all those should be? The setup guide shows them being loosened but there no metric to go off of. Any clarification would be great! Thanks!
You can make a tilt-test.
Hmm okay so that seems good now. I’ll do another test print just incase.
Set screws should all be tight. There should be no movement between shafts and pullies/couplers.
Not possible for one (1) consultant to have the knowledge and experience of 30,000+ users. And there is no charge to get your answer$ here.
For a business your money would be better spent on a CO2 laser than a consultant.
I doubt I need that level of experience. a grey beard to give me a push in the right direction at times would be nice tho. Will leverage this forum in the mean time. @Dskall thats down the road I need to justify the expense of something over an entry level system first.
Not to mention the things completely bricked now somehow. Starting an etch sounds alarm 3. it tries to return to home and over shoots then rails out on the X,Y. The motors start whining then I have to shut it off after that or im afraid ill burn the motors out.
Whatever you did, undo it.
Cardinal Rule: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
@MikeyH Thats the crux of it, i wish i could. I literally have no idea what I could have possibly changed to cause this. I even deleted the software and the backup and reinstalled and its still bricked. After this last crash I cant even connect to it anymore, anytime i connect it just white screens on the LCD and wont connect. Deleting device and adding it back manually didnt help either. Very close to just returning this thing and buying something nice.
Trying but not doing anything
Crashing and railing out
Interesting… etching from SD card seems to work
This indicates it is definitely a communications issue. Sometimes the CH340 driver gets corrupted. Try removing that in Windows and reinstalling.
Nice is relative. If you can warranty this machine return, look through the common laser brand names that you see the least of. Everybody has a favorite, mine is Sculpfun.
The system seems to be working a bit better now but I still have some weird issues with prints. This one looks good on the left ~70/80% but the last bit off to the right didnt come out clear. Wondering what the issue could be.
Considering what you used for the material, I would guess moisture content. You might try sticking it in an air fryer oven for 10-15 minutes to remove the surface moisture. Do not try to dry it completely because you will get a big wedge split.
Okay I can try that when I get home. Tests other than that worth trying if that doesn’t fix it. I’d be shocked if these had moisture in them. They aren’t freshly cut I’ve been sitting on these for afew weeks.
Being whiskey, you could make a good point that the blurriness on right was intentional.
I would be doing tests on material with more consistency.
I’ll cast a vote for mechanical troubles:
For example, the tops of the letters are scanned on adjacent passes, but they’re vertically separated by scans lower down the letter forms: the left-to-right scans track differently than the right-to-left scans.
This looks like a sloppy-loose idler wheel or some such that introduces backlash as the laser head travels along.
With the power off, give the laser head a good shove in all directions to feel for slack. Ease it back and forth along the gantry to feel for slack as the direction changes. Don’t assume anything was correctly assembled at the factory.
Good hunting …
Eds the man with the plan always. Thank you! All that makes sense I’ll try that shortly when I get home. Well I assembled it but the directions weren’t great so I’m sure there’s something off.
On the upside, you have a powerful motivation to do it right, as opposed to just getting the job done.
Most likely, there’s a loose screw in there somewhere. Having just finished assembling a Prusa MK4 printer, I (once again) learned it’s easy to miss putting that last half-turn on one of 'em …
When you get an error message with a GCode laser like this one, it can be helpful to look at the original open-source error message list to see what the controller is trying to tell you.
Error messages: grbl/doc/csv/error_codes_en_US.csv at master · gnea/grbl · GitHub
Alarm codes:
grbl/doc/csv/alarm_codes_en_US.csv at master · gnea/grbl · GitHub
There are two types of Homing errors that are common here.
If the engraver is supposed to auto-home, it has switches or current detection to tell the controller to stop moving toward home because it’s arrived. If the switch or current detector has failed or is set up incorrectly it can’t tell the controller to stop so it will do what you’re describing here.
If the controller is not equipped with switches or current detection and if/when it is instructed to home, it will overshoot and also do what you’re describing.
When homing, If the engrave head runs away from the switches, this is a different problem. This is caused by an incorrect setting in the controller or a wiring problem. These are factors that LightBurn doesn’t control when auto-homing but this can usually be adjusted without rewiring.
The temporary fix for all of this in LightBurn is to click Edit, click Device Settings, and turn off the switch marked “Auto-home on startup” - Then carefully click OK in the bottom row. Lightburn won’t send the command to home. You physically move the engrave head to the home position before powering up the laser engraver.
It’s now set for an engraver that has no switches or current sensing (no auto-homing).
So, if Lightburn connects to the laser now, in the Console window type the following lines one at a time followed by Enter:
$$
$RST=$
$$
$i
Scroll back in the Console window, Select and copy all the output and paste it into a reply here.
We should see the factory settings which often tell us that your laser engraver has auto-homing or doesn’t have auto-homing.
We’re all right here. Best to avoid staircases when asking for this. 
(grey-beard humor… sorry… )
I can’t stress this enough. This is almost always a step backward and almost always moves people further from the solution.
That said, the settings are probably still available in an lbprefs file. If you do a brute-force search of your hard drive for lbprefs files, you may find an early file is still entact. LightBurn saves the last 50 versions (which is the most amazing and useful thing I’ve ever seen). If you have lbprefs files from before and after it stopped working, please drag and drop them into your reply here. I’m happy to take a look.
The white-screen symptom is very important.
This may be a hardware problem.
If one of the changes is unintentionally leaving the SD card in the controller and attempting to connect with the USB cable this could be the reason.
With some controllers, the USB serial competes with the data lines used for loading the SD card info into the controller. Some of the controllers also show conflicted data lines with a screen and an SD card.
The symptom of a white screen when plugged in with a cable could also be pointing at a damaged board or a bad cable.
Finally…
Are you engraving on carpet? The chemistry of synthetic carpet is proprietary and rarely published, but you could safely assume it’s petroleum-based and likely flammable - unless it’s chemically treated with even more hazardous stuff.
You may want to consider a nice flat chunk of drywall or cement board as a safer surface for your engraver to rest on.
