I’ve been using a FoxAlien 4040xe for a few months now, I recently picked up another laser from a friend of ours. When I unhooked the FA to see if the other laser even worked (which it didn’t) and rehooked up the FA, the laser comes on and engraves but its no where near as dark as before I unhooked it. I’ve been in the cuts/layers section multiple times, turned the power wide open and speed way down. It’s like its barley penetrating the wood (bass wood). I havent changed any other settings anywhere. I dont understand how a simple unplug can cause this, Any help would be appreciated by the Laser Wizards here. Thanks in advance!
A simple unplug won’t cause this, it seems you changed some settings. Show yours.
Post up your GRBL settings and in meantime make sure you values match in GRBL and Lightburn.( Svalue max = $30)
This should ideally be set at 255 in both Lightburn Settings and in your controller grbl settings, as the 4040XE isnt really made to run a laser module being an 8bit controller, simple engraving possible but just not good enough to do images.
Also check the values for $100 and $11 this depicts maximum speed, as movement and power are directly related.
I slightly disagree here, those could/should be set to 1000 which gives a more fine-grained gradation. It only needs to be set to 255 if the grbl firmware version is before 1.1f.
And there is no difference between the 8bit and 32bit controllers in terms of engraving quality, they run the same firmware and there is no performance gain with a 32bit controller (it’s not the controller that limits image processing, it’s the serial connection).
You can believe what ever you want, no denying that fact but whether what you belive to be true and accurate, thats not for me too argue with sometimes its not possible to educate people. i would explain how you are quite off track in your comments but feel the conversation would be similar to those that we have with our 14 year old child.
So next time you 10 year old PC is not running as quick in comparision to something newer just stick a USB Port expansion card in the back.
But physics and Mathematics states you are factually incorrect
you also need to research more, maybe Jason will pop on to explain in detail as they more likely have something to copy paste instead of writing it from scratch
Oops, it seems that you got me wrong here. Nothing that I said was meant offensive in any way.
It was just to add some information to the topic because your statements were not accurate.
I worked with laser firmwares for Atmegas/Arduinos/ESPs for many years, compiled my own versions of grbl and derivates and therefore I can assure you that there is no gain in changing the s-value to 255 at an 8bit-controller except you are running grbl before 1.1e, which had a different default. A value of 1000 gives a mathematical better representation of the LB power percentage to the actual laser power, additionally.
And the same holds for the statement that you can’t do images with an 8bit controller. The results are the same on both controllers. Most firmwares use the same motion planning algorithm (the ESP port of the grbl firmware). The only difference is the computational power, which doesn’t have an effect in reality because the standard baud rate of 115200bps is simply not enough to make the faster processors use their additional power.
That’s all I wanted to say, I entirely agree with the rest of your statements.
$0=10
$1=255
$2=0
$3=0
$4=0
$5=0
$6=0
$10=3
$11=0.010
$12=0.002
$13=0
$20=0
$21=1
$22=1
$23=3
$24=25.000
$25=500.000
$26=250
$27=3.000
$30=10000
$31=0
$32=1
$100=40.000
$101=40.000
$102=160.000
$110=6000.000
$111=2000.000
$112=2000.000
$120=300.000
$121=300.000
$122=300.000
$130=400.000
$131=400.000
$132=55.000
ok
Here are the settings If I’m being 100% honest, I have no idea how any of them got changed. I’ve been using lightburn since i got this cnc/laser combo about 5-6 months ago i guess and it’s still a different language to me. I had to manually set the other laser up so maybe I did something there. I pulled GRBL up in the manual set up and then done the work area settings like it asked, other than that I’m stumped.
That’s probably the problem then. Check the s-value-max setting in the device settings window. If you added the machine new as grbl device, this value will have been set to 1000. Since yours is 10.000, you only use 10% of the maximum power. Either set $30 to 1000 or change the s-value max to 10.000. Either one will work. If you still use it as CNC, leave it at 10.000 and change the value in LB.
That got it fixed; I sure appreciate your help with this. I’ve got notes written down now so maybe one day I’ll get it figured out. Thanks again for your help!!