I have a very simple diode laser attached to a 3D printer, it works great but I’m having some trouble with the “overscan” function which appears to be leaving small trails / lines outside of the bounds of the image. I wasn’t sure what it was until I turned overscan off, and it appears about 90% better (though I obviously know the trouble it can cause to have overscan turned off as well).
I have very little to no knowledge about what I’m doing admittedly, I’m only doing basic things, I’ve not gotten very deep into the settings. My confusion is that it doesn’t happen on every pass, just on ‘some’ of them, so adjusting overscan length for example I’m not sure is a wise decision.
Does anyone have any advice? Maybe it’s not even overscan, maybe it is something else and overscan is just affecting it.
Attached are images with overscan on, and overscan off. Edit: I should mention only the dark figure (jackal) is printing in an image mode, the rest is in line mode, but I did a copy of this where the whole thing was an image and it all had those artifacts all over it.
The bits on the back of the legs are not part of the design, no. That’s why I mentioned it seemed 90% better if nothing else
There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with the power that I can find. The laser is of course powered by the 3D printer, and the printer works as a 3D printer without any issues
And, again just for clarification, the design has no issues with line or even offset fill, it’s mostly just image and fill that have this issue which is what led me to believe it’s something about the overscanning
But if any of those things were true, wouldn’t the problem also appear in any other mode? And also with scanning turned off? And wouldn’t the 3D printer also have issues due to that same factor? (it doesn’t, I may know nothing about laser burning but I know everything about 3D printing, this machine is calibrated well)
For what it’s worth, I’m not opposed to dropping the printer-mounted laser and getting maybe a cheap setup like a Comgrow V1 or something similar, I’m just a bit concerned I’m going to end up with the same results. The mounted laser was a nice toy but maybe this kind of thing is not going to work well enough when piggybacking off a printer.
Since the printer is calibrated (belts, power, connections, everything is good and it makes caliper-perfect prints), the only other ‘machine-level’ thing I can think of is a) some delay in the Laptop driving the setup, or b) the laser is drawing even more power than the 3D printer does and is maxing out what the power supply can handle, though I find it a bit hard to believe.
Still, I know what you’re saying, if it’s not in the preview, it’s the machine… but I do think it is probably a bit more complex than that. However this laser setup may be too cheap to put too much energy into trying to fix, heh
A “5 W output” laser module will draw at least 20 W from the power supply, which would be an additional amp at 24 V and twice that at 12 V.
Given that most tabletop 3D printers and lasers arrive with power supplies barely adequate for the original hardware, a 5 W laser module should have a separate supply.
If you’re running it from the printer’s supply, using a separate supply should improve the situation.
Also, it’s regrettably common for a new power supply to just gradually give up, rather than fail completely. Even if the module came with a power supply, it might not be working correctly out of the box.
I have since moved the laser from one 3D printer to another, and I’m getting much better results even with overscan on. The weird thing is I moved it from a newer printer (my Sovol SV06 Plus) to a much older one (4 years old now – Sovol SV01 Classic). I wasn’t expecting to get better performance on the old one, but I knew I had it up and running a year ago so I decided to switch it back.
Funny because I was about to yeet the old SV01 to the recycling. I guess I have to keep it now
