With the right macro after many tries I could cut through 4mm plywood at 200mm/m 100% and 2 passes, with burnt sides. It doesn’t seem right compared to videos about the engraver when they had no problem going through 3mm at 450 100 1 with clean edges.
It looks like after autofocusing there is a small rectangle at the laser point.
So I removed the autofocus rod, manually adjusted the height until I had a point and tried again and it cut at first pass with no problem, but the metal underneath got more burnt than it should.
If I then reinstalled the rod, it would stop me before getting that spot.
Is the problem in the lenses or in the software(it was the same in both Lightburn and LaserGRBL)?
Most diode lasers like this produce a rectangular spot… co2 types produce round a spot. It’s usually something like 0.1mm X 0.08mm …
A photo like that wouldn’t have the ability to see that small of a rectangle, so it’s out of focus, I’d suspect.
I don’t know what you mean by this… What macro… You also mention it has an autofocus macro… please explain. Is this software/hardware automated or just a focus block or ?
Maybe you are not getting much in the way of responses because of the description … ?
Many of these types of machines have a specified focus and after shipping and handling may have moved or changed focus a bit…
Sounds like you have nailed it down to the focus mechanism not working correctly…
Depends on what you mean by auto focus and how it works.
If this is your machine, it looks like there is no motor on the Z axes and you have to turn the knob to adjust the Z axes for focus. Can’t really tell from the photo.
Is this correct?
With no motor on the Z axes, there is no way for the soft/hardware to focus it.
Looks like a real nice machine… not much on how it works… yet, still reading…
These come with the laser in a config file on an micro SD. They can move the Z-axis and set the relative position of Z = 0 to approx. 7 mm above the material, then move closer if you want to cut.
It seems that the focal point has moved by transport as you said.
Also I found out I mounted the laser 5 mm higher than instructed but the results were indifferent.
I think I will just have to live with it and optimize the cutting as much as I can in the software, maybe even ditch the autofocus rod and focus it manually every time.
