Flattening levels at print to speed up engraving

Is there an option that I am missing to basically at print time to flatten all the levels of LB into one so each level doesn’t print individually sometimes causing longer burn times? For example I have a border around the project that takes forever even with fast scan on because it is only a little area to actually engrave but has a long ways to go between the top and bottom edges on a 12x12 substrate, to come back and do objects that are inside the border. It would be better if it was possible during the white space travel to also fill in those objects at the same time reducing the movement of the laser head over now requiring moving over the substrate twice.

There are some Optimization settings in the Laser window - depending on your file there might be some gains there.

If you’re working with gray-scale images I don’t believe that you can flatten other art into them.

If you’re willing to share the file someone would likely be able to make a well informed suggestion.

JohnJohn,

Thank you for the response. Here is one of the files I was referring to - it has a boarder that engraves first (and takes a long time even with white space turned on), then goes back and engraves the other objects.

Dani Memorial Tile.lbrn2 (2.3 MB)

With my simulation settings i managed to knock about a third out of the time to do the ‘Boarder’ layer by changing it to Pass-through instead of Stucki.

Offset Fill made a small gain in the text layer.

You may also have good results with a reduction in DPI. 318 DPI may be correct and ideal for your laser but a 10% reduction would represent a significant time savings and the images may be sharper if the dots currently overstrike or overlap each other.

Thank you for the input. Using Stucki and 318 DPI since this is NWT method; I have a module that the beam is small enough to actually do 318 DPI.

Ideally it would be best if LB could flatten all the layer is GCODE so that they all print at the same time which would prevent lots of wasted laser movements when not actually engraving.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.