I’ve been getting better at running Material Test tiles, but I have a couple of questions on the setup:
When I am doing a LINE (Cut) Material Test, why does the line “Interval: 0.100 mm” show up on the “label” of the tile?
Is there an option to turn that off and on?
Is tile label affected by the Interval field under the “Edit Text Setting” tab or by the “Edit Material Setting” (if I choose the “Fill” option)?
Why does “Frequency: 20.0 KHz” show up on the tile text? (It shows up on the same line as “Passes: 1”)
As far as I can tell, attempting to override the PWM Frequency setting on a HV 80W CO2 laser (Advanced tab under layer settings) doesn’t really do anything – so I’d like to reduce the clutter on my material test tile texts if that is an option. (More than likely, I ignorantly did something to get it to appear in the first place.)
Suggestion: Is it possible to include a SECOND line for the TITLE? I’d like to include the Lens Focal Length on the test tiles . . . and the title gets a bit long if I would add that to the material and a note for “Cut” or “Engrave.”
What gets printed in the headers is the jobs static data.
Not that I know of.
All labels are handled with settings in the Text settings, what you don’t vary in testing is filled in by the Material settings.
It does with an RF co2… with a DC excited machine, the pwm going into the LPS IN terminal is changed into a dc control voltage, so it doesn’t matter if it’s being driven with an analog or digital signal… From what I can tell, an RF machine operates as a digital device, unlike a glass tube co2.
How would it know?
You can always visit Feature Suggestions and see if it’s already there, where you can add your vote to it or create an entry for others to express their opinions and vote…
Personally there are lots of things they could spend time improving and the materials test isn’t even on that list… It actually work well as is and seems pretty well thought out.
Yes, makes sense. I agree on the fact that it works well as-is – and my questions were fairly obscure, but I was just checking to see if the “as-is” included any bells-and-whistles that I didn’t know about. Thanks for your response.
P.S. How would it know? If LINE is selected in the Material then it CUTS and if FILL is selected, then it ENGRAVES. I suppose the answer was so obvious that the question didn’t need answering. A simple look at the test tile shows whether it was cut or engraved!
If a line engraves an inch deep, and I place it on a 1/4 inch piece, it then cuts, the machine/software has no idea which operation it’s doing…
Some of the RDWorks software has a cut option, but I don’t know how it’s treated in Lightburn. As an absolute rule it seems pretty useless - as a fill is just a bunch of line vectors.
Where did you see this differentiation between line/fill stated?
In the cut/layers tab, if you select a specific layer to edit, among the options there are three things:
Line
Fill
Offset fill
I select LINE when I want to CUT a shape.
I select FILL if I want to ENGRAVE a shape.
I think I understand the confusion I may have created by using the terms in this way – and I now understand your point: a “Fill” is actually just a bunch of “lines” placed very close together at a lower power setting so that they don’t go all the way through the material – which in my mind makes something look like it has been “engraved.”
I realize I may be using nomenclature which is reserved in the minds of experienced users which make my use of these terms seem confusing. Apologies. My wife may take your side if it comes down to the issue of whether or not I communicate very well.
So, to restate my original question to see if this makes any better sense:
When I select “Line” (in the Laser Tools → Material Test feature), why does the label for that test tile have “Interval 0.1” when the feature is only creating a line around a 5mm square, and not filling a 5mm square with lines which have an interval, (e.g. 0.1, 0.15, 0.08)?
It shows whatever setting is associated for fill in the black layer. If you go into material setting, change it to fill, change the interval from .1 to something else, then change back to line and close. Look at the preview and it will reflect the new setting. It is not actually running at that interval in line mode.
I think it is a programming issue that no one has though of to delete that text if in line mode since it is only a text label.
I suppose the answer was so obvious that the question didn’t need answering. A simple look at the test tile shows whether it was cut or engraved!