I know there are already topics about this, but I don’t think the problem is well understood. I’m trying to engrave a large image on my BOSS 1420.
If I choose true grayscale, the software seems to want to send the entire file, and the laser throws the error as soon as transmission starts.
On the exact same file, it started to burn the job once, but then stopped after a few lines. Usually it doesn’t even start before the controller gives the error. At this point, you have to hit ESC on the controller.
Note that LB does not have any way to abort the transmission of the job, so you either must wait until it’s finished, or kill LB with taskmgr.
Here’s the thing: if I switch to a dithered method it works better, but evetually the controller gives the error. Exact same image in the exact same position.
So I don’t believe that this issue is strictly related to position and acceleration of the head. It feels more like local memory limitations on the Ruida to me.
Rather than try to understand the details on the Ruida, I’d suggest that a nice LB feature would allow the user to tile the image and etch it in sections. I could obviously do this in Photoshop and then import multiple images into separate LB layers, but seems like a very useful feature to make it easy in LB.
‘Not enough extend space’ is the controller telling you that the head is going to travel out of bounds when it overshoots the edge of the image to decelerate and change direction. It has nothing to do with the overall size of the image - it’s just that part of it is too close to the edge of the work area for the speed you are running it at. If you tiled it, but positioned it identically, you’d get the same error.
To fix the error you can:
Reduce the speed, which will reduce the amount of overscan required
Move the image inward, away from the edge of the machine
Increase the engraving acceleration, which will also reduce the overshoot, but may cause steppers to skip if it’s too high
The reason you get the error sooner in grayscale is that grayscale engraves all pixels, including the white, ignoring only transparent areas, where dithering only touches the dots, and skips white areas entirely.
As I said, I’m having trouble squaring this answer with my observations.
If it had to do with the position of the image and the movement of the tool, I would expect NO lines to be rendered. And I would expect it to make no difference when the laser was on. Instead I get some, and then an error. Which feels an awful lot more like buffer / memory.
There is exactly one thing that causes the “not enough extend space” error: when the system determines that the line to be drawn would go out of bounds during overscan.
When running a grayscale image, all non-transparent pixels are burned, and therefore the first line of the image is the same as any other if no transparency is present, and the first line would cause the error.
If the image is dithered, only black dots are burned, so if the image is narrower at the bottom, the processor might not know right away.