Provide a power level percentage for Tabs?

LightBurn Software Questions
1

Love the new feature and capabilities Tabs provide, great implementation.

It occurred to me that being able to set the power level as a percentage for the tab region might be really handy. 0% is default, but being able to set say 50% would burn part of the way through, giving you one clean edge and smaller amount of material to break away and clean up.

Anyone else see value in this?

2

We discussed this internally even before it was released, but we have to figure out if it’s possible on the various hardware we support. DSP devices in particular don’t just let you arbitrarily change the power in the middle of a cut. We could use the power-scale feature, but that requires Min & Max power set correctly, and if you’re cutting slow only min power is used, so that doesn’t work.

There are a couple other roadblocks, but we’re looking into a couple different ways to do something like this.

1 Like
3

Nice, curious to see how the investigations proceed.

I guess it would technically be a different path, a boolean of the original.

4

If you are cutting so slowly that min power is already in use then this would just mimic the current functionality right? Would be a bit confusing perhaps so I can understand not wanting to generate more support requests :slight_smile:

5

With a GCode-based system, it’s easy to just emit a different power value. Ruida has a command that can be used to change power without needing a different layer, but we also need a way to feed this through the system - we have the ability to put a “scale” on a line right now, but would need a different place to put a ‘power override’ type value.

It could be done as a completely different set of geometry (like, cut the path with gaps, then set a different power setting and cut the gaps) but if the system has backlash or slop, they might not align perfectly.

It’s also possible to do it with “fake PWM”, like perforations - If we made a gap that was actually multiple shorter gaps with the laser firing in between, it would likely work - doing 10 in a row of a 0.1mm gap and a 0.1mm cut would give you a 2mm long “tab” that was easier to break than one fully uncut, but sturdier than a single, smaller gap.

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