Hello, sorry to pop up in here twice today, but suddenly my z axis decided to start moving itself at the start of a job?
I get it manually focused, hit go, and before it starts lasering the z axis is dropping itself down. I’ve had this happen once or twice before, usually solved by exiting LB and re-opening it, or restarting the laser, or changing layer colors. However this time none of those worked. I’m trying to do a simple fill job (one pass obviously) with only one layer.
What are your settings for this cut?
Have a look at this for how your Z axis is controlled within LightBurn: https://github.com/LightBurnSoftware/Documentation/blob/master/DeviceSettings.md#z-axis-controls
Do you have Z enabled? If you have the Z control enabled, and you don’t have ‘Relative Z moves’ set, it will move to the set material height when the job starts.
300mm/s speed, 32.5% power min and Max, .065mm interval. Starting the logo at the center point, single layer set to “fill”.
Weirdest part is I was doing a run of 10 of this item. First 3 were flawless, I “started” the job the first time in LB so it sent the most recent file to the laser. After that I’d place a new item and hit “start” on the laser itself for #2 and #3. #4 is when I noticed it was very light engraving … So I put #5 in and hit start, and noticed the z axis moving itself. During this time I hadn’t touched the computer, Lightburn, or laser except to hit start on laser.
I’ll have to look if z is enabled, I know I can move the z in Lightburn using the controls there. Another thing I noticed is that after the problem cropped up, Lightburn would tell me “I can’t get your machine’s z axis position, do you want to continue yes/no” (I’m paraphrasing because I don’t recall the exact words). I’m not sure why that would happen, the computer didn’t go to sleep or anything and nothing was unplugged (I’ve got both USB and Ethernet connected to laser).
If it’s showing you that, you do have Z control enabled, and you do have Relative Z Moves set, but it wasn’t able to read the current Z height of the machine to get the correct height to base the moves off of. If you don’t regularly run jobs that have Z moves in them you’re better off turning off Z control. The up/down arrows work no matter what - the Z Enable just sets whether your jobs will run the Z or not.
Hi guys:
I thought I had this problem fixed, but alas it is back. Both enable z axis and relative z axis moves only are turned OFF in device settings. I just opened a brand new Lightburn file, imported a DXF file, and set it to “line”. I manually focused the laser, and pressed go. I observed the z axis moving itself, and after a few moments I pressed pause and put my focus gauge back on it. The z axis had moved upwards at least two millimeters, I have no idea why.
“Pass count” is only set to 1, in layer settings the z step per pass is set to 0mm.
If Z-Enable is turned off, it absolutely should not be moving the Z. Let me have a look. Can you press the ‘Save RD File’ button and email the rd file to developer at LightBurnSoftware dot com? I can see from that if there are Z moves in the file.
Looking in the code, I do not see a way for them to be emitted if you have Z enable turned off.
Will do, sorry had internet issues that delayed emailing you the file.
I’m wondering if it’s a thing with the laser? It’s a Boss LS-1420 65W, and it almost seems to me like the laser origin is for some reason including a z move to whatever it thinks default/origin is? I haven’t touched any of the settings inside there, but I think I can defeat the auto-z move by focusing manually then pressing “origin” on the keypad a few times before sending the file from LB. That seems to stop it from adjusting itself.
As an aside, I just saw the LB+Boss partnership, congratulations! The email mentioned a Boss specific version of LB “with every machine or available for purchase on our site”, maybe in a different thread can you shed some light on what will be different for that version and if existing LB users can swap to that Boss specific version? Sorry for throwing a lot out there, thanks again for your awesome and excellent ongoing help!
You weren’t the first:
And thank you - Oliver is a good guy, and patient. He’s been watching LightBurn almost since the beginning, probably waiting for the product to mature enough that he could be reasonably sure we’d be around a while.
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