After business coming off my k40 went through the roof this holidays I decided to buy a 2nd machine and went for the biggest one I could fit alongside my k40 which is an Omtech 50w 500x300.
It’s dialed it all in and got it all working really well hardware-wise, I just need to up my extractor fan game, if anyone has a good suggestion that isn’t horribly loud? Hardware is the easy bit for me.
The main reason for posting is the fill engraving, it works great but is slow in comparison to the K40. It looks like it is moving a great deal from side to side compared to the size of the thing it’s engraving but I haven’t a clue if that is normal or what to look for in the settings.
It has a KT332 controller which I believe is either the same as or a close copy of a Ruida controller, which is backed up by Lightburn detecting it as one. I’m a little afraid to tweak the settings on it because I don’t understand them much so welcome advice or if anyone uses the same machine and wants to share their settings with me I’d be grateful.
For the sake of clarity, is it the actual engraving speed or the movement of the laser, manually with the controller’s arrow arrows, you mean?
You set the actual engraving speed in LightBurn for the different layers and tasks. If you use the same values as with your K40, then it is possible that it uses different “units of measurement”, find out and correct it. I have switched from mm / min to mm / s, it feels a little strange at first but is ok now. My speeds have always been very conservative, I do not like that everything shakes and eventually falls apart just to get the job done 2 min faster. When cutting, of course, it depends on the material and the thickness to be cut, but try to look at my test discs I love to make, these are the final "results I have found, for the different materials.
I have not had time to engrave much with my new machine, but here we are at approx. 300mm / s, (I used the included file) it seemed quite acceptable to me.
I have almost the same configuration as you have, also a K40 and a diode laser standing in my workshop. The controller is also the same and I am extremely satisfied so far.
I wish you a lot of fun with the machine and Merry Christmas.
Before you ‘touch’ any configuration information… Go to ‘Edit → Machine Settings’, read the controller (it probably will) and ‘save’ it to a file that you will keep for a ‘factory’ fresh copy.
When you break it, you can restore the original configuration. Come up with a naming scheme and use it when changing values.
As far as your speeds, @bernd.dk advise to check to ensure they are working in the same units.
Not having a K40, I can’t really relate to ‘slow in comparison’. My China Blue will outrun most K40 in many areas.
What kind of speeds are you attempting to run and in what mode, line or image?
These speeds could be affected by the selected units…
So to answer the questions I can confirm I’m only talking about the speed of a Fill (engrave) operation, all the other cutting, and line-based operations are much faster than the older K40. And I can also confirm that the units are the same on both (mm/sec). It zips around at about 400mm/sec if I hit the movement arrows on the controller, not that I do that much. My only issue right now with the line operations is it’s very cautious in the corners so at minimum viable power it leaves a little charring.
Thanks for suggesting the machine settings backup, I was doing them yesterday when I dialed in the minimum laser settings so corners would engrave on the lowest settings but it’s always worth prompting people with backup suggestions!
To try and clarify what I mean, imagine I’m engraving a 3cm logo, On the k40 I would set it to about 100mm/sec 9% and a 2.5% overscan, that overscan would mean I wouldn’t get fuzzy edges where the machine reacts to inertia, It would take about 1 min 30 to engrave and the head bearly goes past the edges of the design. On the Omtech the same speed and power but there’s no overscan option, when it engraves it goes almost an extra 3cm each side of the log meaning in each pass it’s moving about 9cm, it’s almost like it’s got a 100% overscan built-in and takes about 2 mins to do the same operation.
Interestingly the times don’t seem to speed up if I increase the speed to 200mm/s either which makes me think it’s some sort of acceleration cap it’s hitting but I don’t know enough about the machine settings to know what to change without breaking everything.
100mm / s is 6000 mm / min, I have never been able to drive it with my K40. I also do not think that the time savings can actually be registered for small items, it is the weight of the laser head that makes the machine have such a large overflow. Start - stop is too close to each other, the machine does not have time to get up to speed and also not to brake in “good time” - there is no time.
