Why does rotating a project increase the run time significantly?

Community Laser Talk
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1

Hello, all. I am new to the laser community and am still trying to learn the ropes and finding ways to be more efficient.

I am using an AtomStack A5 M30 with the AtomStack R3 Rotary attachment.

I am currently mocking up a few designs to engrave onto tumblers for our store and one thing I have noticed is that when I complete a design and preview the project, the estimated run time will be, for example, 7-9 minutes. But when I rotate the project 90 degrees so it will be oriented correctly on the tumbler, the estimated run time increases to at least double of that original run time, 15-20 minutes.

Is there a reason for this that I am missing? Am I doing something to cause that?

If it was just a minute or two I probably wouldn’t care to dig into it but considering the drastic jump, I want to at least understand why and hopefully figure out a way to combat that.

Hopefully this makes sense and I appreciate any and all help!

Thanks,
JF

2

We would need to know what the project actually is, but, to give a simplistic example, imagine this is your project:

. . . . . .

If you were to engrave that left to right, the laser would spend a significant amount of time traveling across the empty space between the squares. Rotated 90 degrees, there would be no more traveling over the blank regions while engraving.

There are options that can help with this - The most useful being ‘Fast Whitespace’, available in Edit > Device Settings. If you enable that (and optionally give it a maximum speed), the laser will go faster through the blank areas than it does when engraving.