Lightburn slowing down/stuttering during pass

Hi, I’ve posted before but disappeared due to medical issues taking precedent, and the post has now been archived. Previous post here.

Since then I’ve done a lot of testing. Dropping the DPI and speed has helped quite a bit, but I’m still having issues at (what I think are) reasonable settings.

At .1 Interval at 150 mm/s, I’m still getting stuttering and slowing down, which leads to uneven engraving. This is with text, it’s worse depending on what’s being engraved. I also have a problem with it printing slanted, but that’s reduced when I reduced the speed. Please see below:

Picture of the settings:

So my question is, is this normal? Is this just how it is or is there something wrong?

You modified your K40. If you used the original PSU, it’s marginal, at best.

If you added a separate power supply, what are its specs? If you didn’t, seriously consider it.

My K40s have separate power for controller/steppers (24V) , 5V (accessories - lights, etc.) and the original PSU only drives the HT for the tube.

I don’t recall smoothie-type boards drawing an excessive amount of current, but compared to the M2 Nano, it could be enough to cause brownout of the 24V rail.

As a reference, I have a K40 on the bench with a Smoothieboard 3XC, 350W 24V PSU, 15W 5V PSU, and a 60W laser supply - the original PSU has been removed. The power settings for X and Y are 0.8A. I’m using C3D’s modified Smoothieware that includes Oz’s improved ‘cluster’ look-ahead for scanning and have turned on ‘Enable Smoothie Clustering’ mode in LB.

It has no problem with 300mm/s at 0.05 mm engravings. No indication of slowdown or stutter.

Thanks for the response.

I should have specified, All of the problems listed above are with the Cohesion3d LaserBoard and included power supply. The only thing the original power supply seems to be running is the laser itself, and all of the problems remain even if the laser power set to 0.
The Laserboard does pull more current than I would have thought at rest (if the DC power connector is unplugged/plugged in it sparks like a mofo.)

I’m using the same software as you are with Clustering and I absolutely can’t even get close to 300 mm/s at .05. I’ve adjusted the power settings up to 1.0 in the config with no change. Something seems wrong and I have a absolutely no idea what it is. I just can’t imagine that this board is so much more limiting than the one that came with it.

I just realized that the C3D forum is different than the Lightburn forum. I had it in my head it was the same company. Maybe I should be posting this over there…

If you have any ideas on what to check, I’m all for it.

If you update the firmware to enable clustered gcode, it will improve the performance a lot.

Hi Oz,
It has the latest firmware and clustering is enabled, but I’ll re-flash it just to be sure.

Not the latest, but the specific cluster mode from C3D

It will run a bunch of firmware, but only that one will support cluster mode

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.