I am wanting to engrave a pattern w/ my 60W MOPA on titanium (which gets brilliant colors) but I want one color to fade to multiple others across the pattern… can this be done with an SVG file or only in greyscale?
I’m wondering if there is a way to also vary the frequency instead of ONLY the power.
iirc, no. I’m working on my own implementation for pretty much the same reason.
I have a similar machine. I found changing power levels less effective than interval changes.
I don’t know of any way to change interval as it’s executing a layer and I doubt that a grayscale would be relatively linear to a color change.
Metals change colors by heating them to certain temperatures and creating an oxide layer that reflects some of the light while some is reflected by the metal itself. This mixing of light, just like radio frequencies, creates other light frequencies that cause us to see that as color.
Changes in color can occur within less than 100 degree change in temperature and are not linear since the size of the metal and of the working area change effecting how much heat is there.
These are pulse lasers and there are many things that change when doing metal. Pulses/mm, interval, power, scan rate, q-pulse, ambient temperature. A lot of it is the metals ability to take the created heat elsewhere. I had issues when I got near the edges of the material and after a lot of thought, the only thing I know changed is the heat had more of a restricted area that it could move.
I don’t know of a way to get a consistent color tone change and I’ve resolved to using different layer to create this as best I can. You can usually tell where a layer changes so I’m sure this isn’t what you want.
I’ll be following this thread for suggestions… At this point I don’t think I can offer any real solution.
Good luck
