I’ve been engraving ceramics for a couple of years now and have recently started to have a lot of issues with the rotary chuck stopping and restarting in the middle of the engraving. The engraver head keeps moving back and forth and the rotary will start back up after missing a few steps, but it ruins the piece–leaves a deep cut line where the chuck stopped moving and messes up the design. (see link for photo)
I’ve been using an Xtool D1 pro. I started with an Xtool RA2 rotary chuck. The first one I got had these issues out of the box–I returned it for a replacement, and everything was working well for a year and a half or so, then I started having the same problem again. It started doing it occasionally, then eventually on every single piece. Figured it was an issue with the chuck and got the Ortur version, the YRC1.0. It’s doing better than the RA2, but still having the same problem every 10th piece or so. I tried swapping out the computer everything is attached to and it didn’t make a difference–the first computer is running Lightburn 1.4.0, the other is running 1.4.05. Only thing I haven’t changed at this point is the D1 frame itself.
Anyone have any insight as to why this is happening and how to make it stop? I’m wondering if there’s a setting somewhere that somehow got changed or if there’s some default voltage setting somewhere that’s wrong. I’d greatly appreciate any information if anyone else has run into this problem. Broken engraving
The rotary looks like it has a belt or gear reduction drive, so check for crud / dust / whatever packed into the drive train. Also look for wear: does the belt / gearing have any teeth left?
A too-high axis acceleration value can cause the motor to stall briefly, particularly when combined with a bit of junk in the drive train. If you’re using the same acceleration on the rotary as with the linear Y axis, reduce it by a factor of ten, which will not have much effect on the rotational performance.
You may be able to compensate for too-high acceleration by dramatically reducing the Y axis speed, but that also requires changing the machine settings. Reducing the LightBurn layer speed won’t help, because that will reduce the scanning speed on the X axis.
Unfortunately, xTool has a terrible history when it comes to modifying the firmware configuration settings to improve on their defaults. This lengthy discussion covers some of the problems in a situation like yours:
If keeping the drive train clean & orderly doesn’t help, the next steps will be difficult. Other folks may have suggestions, but xTool firmware seems immune to many of the common solutions.
The Xtool RA2 has a bunch of belts with nooks and crannies I thoroughly cleaned out–that was my first thought, something got stuck in the belt teeth or one of the teeth got damaged–but it didn’t help, and the Ortur YRC1.0 doesn’t have any belts to mess up. Which really set me up for disappointment when the YRC1.0 seemed to be working fine for about a dozen engraves and then started doing the same thing. The YRC1.0 has a far lower fail rate than the RA2, but still enough to be a serious problem.
I’ll try lowering the Y-axis speed by a factor of 10 as you suggest–should I try that with the max rate as well as the acceleration or just the acceleration? (max rate is 6000 by default, acceleration is 300)
I also ordered an Ortur H10 to replace the Xtool D1 since that’s the last thing I haven’t tried replacing. Seems like Xtool has an awful lot of problems all around.
Although all machines are different, that Y-axis acceleration seems too high by at least a factor of ten. Try it at 10, which may be about right, and see what happens.
You can (and should) back up the current settings:
Thanks for the info! Unfortunately, it looks like I’ve got one of the units with firmware problems–the Y axis machine settings won’t write under the drop down menu or when I try manually changing them in the console–it doesn’t give me an error, but when I read them to see if they wrote, they’re unchanged and the problem persists. Looks like I just have to wait for the Ortur to get here, which is unfortunate timing with my biggest market of the year 4 days away.
From xTool’s viewpoint, making the settings invariant eliminates a whole bunch of support tickets for folks who changed something and now It Just Doesn’t Work. That their machines don’t work under a variety of common conditions is Not Their Problem.
Haha yeah, I suppose on that level they did a very expert job of ensuring these are My Problems and not Their Problems.
It seems wild to me that someone would figure out how to change those settings without knowing how to save a backup of the defaults, but I’m sure it does happen all the time…
