I think the minimum line width for most fiber lasers with a galvo is 0.001, I found that the cut settings UI limits it to that, but material generator UI doesn’t (it’s probably a bug). So when you use line widths smaller than 0.001 as you are doing then who knows what line widths are actually used.
Do material tests with line widths starting from 0.001, not 0.0001. Also a few days ago I posted some of my material tests for colors on steel, they include some nice red and other colors in a post here, you might find them useful, at least as a starting point.
We’d have to ask the technical Lightburn people to see if they know what’s going on. Maybe @Rick can enlighten us.. I’ve never attempted to use a value that small.
My shortest lens is an F100mm and it has a spot size of 16 microns (0.016mm). So an interval of 0.0004mm would cover the spot size approximately 40 times. Not to mention take forever, even with a galvo.
In my experience, if I get a color, I can’t really change it’s size without checking the color again. If any of the material dimension change, I have to re-check the color.
It seems pretty sensitive to me when I try for a larger than business card size piece of material or increase image size.
I agree that the limit might be as designed, but as you can see, the Material test tool has exposed that its capable of going smaller, and its showing a difference when it does so.
My goal is to achieve the Red that is being displayed, every person I have talked too has said, “each machine displays colours differently, so you have to try it”
long term goals are to achieve a Red, I have a few new options to try, but after playing with this material tool for a week or so,
every time I use a larger interval, I get blacks and browns.
I have tried playing with a few settings like speed and power as well, but Its such a wide scope of settings, its getting expensive to reproduce
I saw this post yesterday, and when I tried it using the stats you mention, its as if the card was printed completely blank,
there are markings on it, but 15% power might have been too low for me.
Pardon me for jumping in. I don’t have a fiber, so am only going off things I’ve gleaned from reading the forum.
If I understand correctly, color is achieved by localized heating of the metal. When you do the material test you are heating a small area, but by the nature of the test you are also increasing the temp of the entire piece of metal due to thermal conductivity. Because each resulting box is next to a previous test it is starting with a preheated area.
On your larger tests, the metal hasn’t been preheated by the surrounding test areas. Therefore you are not getting the same results.
Does this make any sense, or am I off in my understanding?
It says that, but you don’t know that. Part of the problem is we assume (and hope) what’s displayed is what’s being used, however it doesn’t always end up that way.
These are the areas I expect to find bugs or more likely rounding errors occurring, as I stated, we need some help from one of the Lightburn developers to determine what’s going on.
I can set my q-pulse for values that the source manual states are not available.
It may say an interval of 0.0004mm, but that may not be what’s happening…
The galvo head itself has limitation on precision.
