Hi
So I’m trying to make an indexing plate with my laser. However during the process it stalls and ruins the rest of the index. Do you know why?
Regards
FDJ
From your profile I see you have an EleksMaker. My guess would be one of the following:
- dirty or sticky rails causing the axis to bind
- motor driver power set too low, so the steppers don’t have enough torque
- acceleration too high, so when it changes direction it’s skipping
- idle speed too high, so it skips when moving between cuts
Thanks, I will have a look at this tomorrow. The machine is brand new and clean, so dirt and stickyness I doubt.
Is the motor driver power possible to change through your software? 
Thanks.
If it uses a Smoothieboard or GRBL 1.1g based controller and the motor drivers use digipots, then yes. If the board is using simple step-stick drivers, then no - you’d have to set them manually by adjusting this (with the power off):
On your board there will be two of these, likely red, but the layout and adjustment is basically the same.
This is how my board looks.
It’s getting worse I think, and I don’t know how to set these settings?
The laser seems to function better with the software for emblaser a3, so something must be off? 
It’s possible that the board doesn’t have proper speed limits set, and the Eleks software is limiting it instead. LightBurn cannot tell the board to go faster than the limits set in the firmware, and uses the same simple GCode instructions to drive it.
You could save GCode from both and compare them to see what the differences are.
I’m not really sure what you want me to do. Run the same Gcode, one with lightburn and one with elekscam? 
It’s just so wierd, instead of continuing it’s path through the indexing it turns back into the same loop again and again and so on now, untill I stop it? 
Sounds like the machine is struggling when it bugs out, like it is trying to go both ways simultaneously.
I meant save the GCode from both softwares and compare them. GCode is just text - by looking at the two text files you should be able to see what is different about them. If the GCode from EleksDraw works, maybe it is running slower because the settings are not the same as you have in LightBurn.
The sound you describe would be the steppers missing steps. Do you still have LightBurn set to the default units, mm/sec? EleksDraw uses mm/minute, which is 60x slower, so if you just said “1000” in EleksDraw and also said “1000” in LightBurn, without doing the conversion between mm/sec and mm/min, the LightBurn version would be trying to go much faster than the machine is capable of.
Quite a lot of people are using LightBurn successfully with the EleksLaser machines, so it’s not likely to be an error with LightBurn itself, but more likely how you have configured either LightBurn or the machine settings.
The data from the supplier of the laser states it is possible to go 400mm/s, I was doing 33mm/s while cutting the index, so that should be sorted. I tried reinstalling LightBurn to make sure everything was back to default, no help.
I’ve got no clue how to read Gcodes, let alone how to access something readable?
I’ve touched nothing in machine settings and my other settings are as shown:
Thank you for the time you spend btw. I can assure you I will buy the license if I can get it to work properly
In LightBurn, you can just click the “Save GCode” button near the Start button. For EleksDraw I have no idea if there’s a way to do this - I’ve never used it. I will say that 400mm/sec from an EleksLaser machine is “ambitious”. I’d check the acceleration setting and lower that, as it might help.
Type $$ in the console window and hit enter to see the existing settings. $120 and $121 are the acceleration settings for the X & Y axis in mm/sec^2. What are they set to?
You must have your font scaling turned up on that display. The text is huge! 
Perhaps they’re a tad to big 
first I need to complete the entire program, then evaluate.
I’m fine by it being slower, it’s just for hobby use so speed is not of huge importance, however my point was that surely 33mm/s aren’t to fast for it 
Those settings all look fairly low. Your maximum travel rate is only 83mm/sec (5000mm/min), not 400.
33mm/sec isn’t the only speed in use - LightBurn uses G0 moves (called rapid moves) between cuts, meaning your controller is trying to accelerate to its maximum speed when moving from one cut to the next, which could easily be why it’s stalling. Try setting $110 and $111 to 3000 instead of 5000 and see if that improves things. You would do this by typing the following lines into the console and hitting enter:
$110=3000
$111=3000
I will try adjusting the two parameters later and see the effect
If it doesn’t work: To compare the Gcodes, should I import the same picture to both programs and save it? How do I then access the written codes to compare?
Alternately would it make sense to buy another motherboard or is there other ways to fix it? I’m very annoyed by now 
As I mentioned above, in LightBurn there is a “Save GCode” button near the Start button. You’d load your grid drawing and press Save GCode. Not sure how you do that in EleksDraw, or if it even will.
Changing the motherboard will simply give you a new board with all the settings reset. Learning how to properly tune the board for best operation won’t take long.
I’m currently testing… In elekscam it has completely stopped moving the laser, just cutting in the same spot… in LB it does the same thing as before. Is this a faulty board perhaps?
