Lines on engraving and poor overall results

[RobertH]

Hello again follow burners.

I am not sure if I should be posting this here or maybe the awesome.tech forum.

I am having a few growing pains as I get going with my new rig:
K40 PSU II
LB latest version 0.9.02
Older HP laptop Win 10.
Mini Gerbil set as “Gerbil-STM” (recognized controller automatically).

Overall everything is swell. USB hangs conflicting with a wireless mouse on USB but I will sort that out.
Right now I can Line/Fill pretty well and I am just getting going with grayscale engraving.
My initial testing is going well but as you can see I am having a problem with lining for lack of a better word.
I took a snap of my grayscale LB settings (sorry for the poor quality images, I promise I will get better ones as I get setup).
All settings are default from setting up the Mini Gerbil with a couple of power range and speed changes.
I have tried several combinations of $30 range settings from 30 to 2000 and settled on 255 as opposed to the 1000 which seems to be the default.
Speed is kind of slow at 20 mm/sec but seems smooth enough. Power is not sorted yet either at around 3 %.

I am kind of all over the map shooting in the dark so any foundational guidance y’all can offer would be greatly appreciated and please treat me like a complete moron as assuming I may be missing the basics.

Also, I almost certainly have not provided enough info so please ask me what else I should include to help debug this.

Thx.

[LightBurn (Oz)]

I’m not terribly familiar with the Mini Gerbil, but the lines could be caused by:

• Something interfering with the motion of the Y axis (debris on the rails or belts, loose coupler, etc)
• Not enough current going to the Y axis motor, causing it to miss in-between steps.

Based on the irregularity of the pattern, I’d say the first option is more likely.

[RobertH]

Thanks Oz.
I’ll check both of those things in the morning.