Got a chance to try the new “OMTech Polar” mode and I gotta say it’s awesome having LightBurn just move to the right Z position for my material automatically. Love love love.
However: I’m running into a problem. I have a start delay of 6.5s set for my laser to give the built-in air assist time to spin up to full power. That works fine, but then when my machine goes to do the initial Z move to drop down to the material height, the air assist shuts off - and so then once it reaches the layer height and starts cutting, it takes a few seconds for the air assist to ramp back up to full power. This of course causes all sorts of problems with the first portion of the cut.
Is there a way to get it to keep the air assist on while making Z movements?
(For those who don’t have an OMTech Polar: it has a spinning blower type integrated air assist, so it’s not like an aquarium-style compressor that kicks on instantly, it takes several seconds to ramp up to full speed.)
I’m connecting to my OMTech Polar via a LightBurn Bridge (I modded a Ruida console onto the machine after the fact so that I could change the IP address), in case that somehow affects things.
I don’t but I can certainly find out. Do you know if there’s an easy way to do that via the control panel, without disassembling down to where the wires go into the control board?
I see a wire connected to the “status” pin. I don’t see any connected to the “wind” pin.
(Note that the air assist works normally both during the 6.5 second delay as well as after the Z travel is complete; it’s just while the Z travel is happening that it shuts off.)
So this is interesting: the OMTech Polar has an LED around the Big Giant Button on the right hand side. It’s normally green, but it changes to blue when cutting, or red if there’s an error.
I took a look at it while doing a test cut and it’s staying blue the entire time, including the part where the Z travel is happening and the air assist shuts off.
Now I’m really curious what output is being used to drive the air assist, considering that if the video I posted above is any guide, the “wind” pin isn’t used at all…
Gah. I was hoping to avoid having to tear it down to where I can access the controller again but it might be unavoidable. Ah well, there are worse things
There really no way to tell how it’s wired from the controller to the lps.
I have this video of how the status, out1 and out2 operate on a boot, an error and executing a layer. It’s wired so that the bottom led is out2, next is out1 then status … same order as on the connector label.
Can you look to see if out1 and out2 are being used… This may explain how the big giant button display works.
If you can see that Wind is not used, that of course eliminates that…
I can’t really duplicate this as I don’t have a Z axes… I’ll look at mine and see.
I’d suspect it’s likely something you won’t be able to fix, but who knows… You will have to determine how the air is turned on, wiring wise.
We know how these signals work, at least in general… so initially just a visual should be good.
