sounds like a loose connection somewhere possibly in the connector to the laser head.
read this after haha.
something tells me its a break or almost broken cable/wire inline where it cant be seen or checked. seems temperamental and not reproducible.
when i first bought my first LC-40 10w within a week i had a board fail. replaced board then worked fine. @berainlb helped me troubleshoot through that one. i now have 2 of them and the work great. especially after flashed to GRBL firmware and used in Lightburn.
im going to watch these shortly and get back to this.
also to note. sainsmart support has been very helpful but slow at times. they sent me a new board no charge, fairly quickly. also sent me a whole new unit (no charge) once we discovered that the unit i purchased was defected. (mechanically as well as the board)
Hello Corey,
they were helpful and did send me a new board so I could use lightburn. But shortly after that the problem started. main problem is Sainsmart has not answered any my recent emails. I’m stuck in the water.
in the mean time i have an idea to troubleshoot/eliminate/fix the possible cable issue if you want to try.
start by setting up how you usually would to do any simple job in lightburn. lets go ahead and center the laser in the middle of the work area, then we can focus the laser head to a metal business card or something metal.
now what we can do is “enable fire button” in the “device settings” menu
alright so if your are at this point we can now fire the laser by hitting this button, with adjustments from 0.1%-20%. lets start off very low, say 1% power. ok now you can gently wiggle different sections of the wiring throughout the gantry. if you notice the laser flicker during any point of wiggling the cables i believe that would be the issue.
note the nifty little cable clip that came with them. convenient, but if you noticed how difficult they were to install… to me… this could be problematic to someone not paying very close attention not to pinch the cables while doing this. my speculation is that if there is a problem with a cable it could be at on of these points on the machine.
in addition to this idea heres another. i saw a youtube video where the user pinched his red and black wires between the two main frame connections in this area
Hi Corey
I did check all cable and connections. The funny thing is it seems to work fine towards the back end of the laser but once it gets to a certain point towards the front end it just stops firing? Sainsmart does not respond to my emails which is very frustrating. I offered to return it for inspection. I’m not looking for my money back, I just want to see if they can see the problem and come up with an answer. Once I asked that they stopped responding. I have a you tube video showing exactly what it does. Hopefully you are able to view this. many thanks to all for the suggestions. I will try your test and let you know how I make out. many thanks!!
