OMTech 55 Watt, 16"x24" build space, bought from Amazon in April 2020. Only ever cut lines with it til recently and it worked fine engraving until a few days ago.
My laser is behaving very strange lately. It cuts lines perfectly fine but when trying to engrave images it started doing a strange zig zag in the middle of a raster pass. This appears to result in the raster path being shifted quite a lot and throws the laser out of place from where it should be. That in turn eventually leads to the laser wanting to go beyond the edge of the build space and triggers an error ‘Not enough extend space’.
I tried moving the target for the engraving further out from the edge but that didn’t help (which makes sense since it had plenty of room in first place plus it has enough room to decelerated fine when cutting lines).
Note: I did have an issue where I toggled the PWM in machine settings for both x and y axes since my image was being shifted (dunno if it was zig zagging when I had that issue but it was shifting the image randomly in both directions gradually and not a consistent shift). Still, changing the PWM settings did fix that issue. Not sure if that is leading to my issue here.
You’re engraving an image at 600DPI, which is fairly dense. Try using ‘Send’ instead of ‘Start’ - this will send the job to the laser without the laser trying to run it at the same time. Then go to the laser, press the File button, choose the file, then hit Start on the control panel to run it. With dense jobs this can be necessary, or the laser is somewhat likely to miss some of the data being streamed to it, because it’s doing a lot of work trying to run the job while receiving the file.
This has me hopeful! Now that ya bring it up, the file was quite large and takes forever to send over to the machine. And doing a test run for the past 10mins or so, I get a shift but it only happened once (half image out of place, other half is fine but no zig zags all over the place or gradual nor random shifting of the raster lines). And that does correlate too with the file transfer working more smoothly this one time.
Laptop doesn’t have ethernet port, unfortunately. That would def help. I am still new to photo engraving though and might not even really need 600 dpi to get good results anyhow.
To get 600 dpi, you would have to be able to produce a dot that is 25.4/600 or 0.0423mm.
At 254 dpi, it’s 0.1 size dot. That’s pretty tiny with a co2. I can get consistent dot size of 0.1 pretty easily. The trouble to make it smaller goes up exponentially.
Try this dot size, if you have time. Gives you an idea of what’s going on. The smallest are 0.1mm, you’ll see the pattern.
