I’m really struggling to understand how to use the SN2.0 laser with real world objects that aren’t the thin plywood squares provided. I’ve seen tutorials and they talk about doing the calibration/autofocus (where you have the laser cut those scales into material and autofocus, etc) but surely we don’t do that with every project? you’d need 2 wallets, etc every time, and this is obviously not right. I did fine with 3D printing but this laser thing is new to me so I apologize for the noob questions.
Despite being connected to the Snapmaker, Luban was sitting at the “send to device” screen for a long time (1.5 MB file, shouldn’t have taken so long) so I aborted and saved the g-code to USB and brought it to my A350. I had to manually set the origin but the origin needed to be at the front left home position (like a 3D print) otherwise the boundary would outline way off the plate (rather than the origin being centered on the design). I managed to get the boundary eventually set onto the wood. As of right now I’m engraving a greyscale picture onto the plywood sample but I’m still not sure how’d I do this with another object that isn’t 1.5 mm thick, both with camera capture or manually loading the g-code.
So, can someone help me understand how you engrave onto real-world items like coasters, iPhone cases, wallets? Ideally I want to use camera capture so I can properly see where the image is going to be etched onto but would also want to know how to do this with the generated .nc file that I bring via USB.
My questions:
I’m confused about what is the relevance of the “material thickness” setting - do you set it to 0.8 cm for an iPhone case, or 20 cm for a wooden box? Or is the material thickness meant to adjust for cutting through the material?
Do I manually set z-height with the laser head touching the object, or do I need to move it up a bit for an offset (and where do I get that value? - I did see Laser Focus 23mm on my Luban software when connected).
Is the origin different when using manual file load (eg work origin centered) vs image capture (work origin like 3D printing 0,0 at the front left edge)?
Does image capture require it to be sent via wifi to the snapmaker? If I’m using image capture, how do I set the Snapmaker to the right z-height for the object to be engraved?
If someone has the patience to lay it out step by step or show me a video link how to do this, I’d be forever grateful. I’ve tried to find something but I’ve had no luck.
Give up on camera capture (at least until they make it work).
It doesn’t work properly on anything that’s any height off the bed.
I personally don’t try to control my SM with Luban connected.
I transfer my g-code to the SM and control it from there.
I either use “run boundary” and just judge by eye to set my work origin, or I’ll mark the center with a piece of masking tape and then just remove the masking tape before starting.
You should have been able to run the calibration where it draws a series of lines to determine the focus of your laser. That should be around 23mm but everyone’s laser module is slightly different. Than if you use the auto-focus feature you tell it the thickness of the material and it adjusts accordingly. You can also manually set your z-height by adjusting to the smallest dot.
I gave up on trying to use camera capture and connect through luban because origin was acting differently. I load file with usb or wifi. Then the file origin is the center (as long as you center your image when processing before creating g-code in luban)
Image capture is only wi-fi.
Hopefully that makes sense. Let me know if something is confusing or needs more explanation or pictures to illustrate.
-S
Thanks for the quick reply. Actually now that I think about it the camera capture might be inaccurate anyway especially if an object is quite thick as it appears larger to the camera than it really is. The image is useful to help determine scale visually but measurements would always be more accurate.
My autofocus is done and it was 23 mm too!
So presuming I generate the g-code via usb, etc:
Would that g-code be set up with the origin set for 0,0 to be centered?
By thickness of material, do you mean I enter how thick (or tall) the item is, eg the box, the iPhone case, etc?
Do I manually set the origin on the machine using the jog controls, including the z-height? Do I set the zheight to touching the surface, then the autofocus feature takes it from there?
I’m in the middle of my first laser burn so I can’t trial an error right now, but the process had me confused and wasn’t sure that completing the first tutorial was going to answer my questions, so I appreciate your help!
If you right click on you image you can make sure it’s centered by selecting "reference position’ and then “center”. In the window you should see it being equally spaced with between the same + & - numbers. So for an image that’s 60x60 you’d see it between -30 and +30
Distance of the engraving surface from the top of bed. So if you have a 100mm cube it would be 100mm. A piece of 1/4" plywood would be 6.35 mm.
Set the origin using controls on pad. When you start a job it will give ask you whether you want to autofocus or manually. Select autofocus and it asks you for material thickness and z is set automatically and becomes non-adjustable. Select manual and then you manually set z by watching focus point (I find this really hard to tell and can’t do without safety goggles which I don’t like even though power is low, so I try to avoid.)
As far as power and speed you just have to do some trials. Even with the same type of wood it can vary. If you have spare material or an extra item, that’s the best. Create a small test section and repeat it several times and set different speeds/powers and then run them.
You can add multiple images to luban and run them in one pass with different settings for each. Just arrange them around the center. I usually do about 10mm by 5-10mm and gives me a pretty good indication.
-S
Thanks again for the tips - I was overthinking it but you steered me right! The tutorial file worked well and I even added my puppy’s picture (albeit upside down when assembled) but it was really cool.
I’m now trying tile spray painted with black paint - so far it seems to need 100% power to burn through the paint, but I’ll see how it goes (settings: dot, 7 dot/mm, work speed 1500 mm/min, 4 ms/dot) - 50% power didn’t seem to do anything so I bumped to 100% manually and so far I can see something forming.
I noticed Luban is restricting the engraved image to 125 mm x 125 mm - on my A350? Why is it limiting the size? I’m trying to make it 6" x 6" (152x152 mm) - the gcode preview shows the whole image and the boundary check covered the full perimeter of the tile, and the tile does look like it’s engraving the full size so far. Is the tooltip simply wrong?
(above edited: at first it looked like it wasn’t burning the full size but now it is)
There’s a bug in Luban that gives the 125x125 warning but it should still let you make it larger. At least that’s what happened to someone else on one of these threads and to me on the last thing I tried. But it still let me process and preview and make g-code.
Anything I’ve done with paint or sharpie or another coating like dry moly lube I run at 100%.
You might want to try slowing down to 800mm/min and upping to 5 ms/dot. Set the dot/mm to max which I believe is 10 (20?) Usually something like that only seems to work with vector or B&W - higher contrast images. But always try before you assume that. I created some coasters on slate that turned out beautifully with greyscale.
Those are beautiful! Did you do anything to the slate coaster before burning or is that straight off the machine? Were the settings as you quoted above? I definitely want to give this a try!
Nothing prior to burning.
Slate can run surprisingly fast. I can’t remember if I was at 1500 or 2000 and 4ms/dot. Jog speed at 3000.
Coated with mineral oil afterwards - darkens black and causes white to pop and brings out detail.
Before adding oil:
Have you tried the Nixon methods to etch white tiles to be indelible to scratching off, etc? Curious if our lasers are powerful enough. It involves coating a white tile with some flat white paint, then burning with the laser, and at the end removing the paint with acetone, etc - this leaves a dark etched image burned into the tile’s surface.
Here’s my first ever tile burn with the settings above, with a white tile coated with black paint. My issue is the paint will scratch off easily, although I did apply a clear varnish topcoat but it’s still delicate. I inverted the image to a negative to have the laser burn the black off, revealing the white below. I’m pretty happy with it as a very first go although I wonder if it’ll be brighter with your settings.
I just downloaded Lightburn and I’m playing with it to see if it will do a better job especially if I try to make my own half tone dithered images, although this too is a big jump considering I’ve never done this before!
I assume you read the other thread that gets into dithering and Lightburn?
Haven’t tried painting tiles.
I was going to suggest giving it a clear coat, but then saw you already did that.
I have used dry moly lube (and sharpie) to etch glass.
I’ve also tried using the laser by itself on clear glass tiles that had a silvery surface on the back. From behind it turned okay, and looks good when held up to the light (maybe for a lamp or candle
surround?) But then when I focused through the glass to the back side it turned out amazing! (just need to find some square tiles like this)(a little less power would be good too, started to bubble a little)
I wonder what would happen if you painted it with a ceramic paint/glaze like you would fire in a kiln? Not sure if temps get high enough. Would be interesting to try. Maybe next time I’m at Hobby Lobby I’ll check and see if they have anything like that. The other thing that would be interesting to try would be a powder coat. That’s basically a baked on finish.
Snapmaker showed this method used on a ceramic mug and it worked… It looked like they used black dry erase marker rather then paint though, because they simply wiped it off at the end of the video.
I tried using moly to mark some container lids for my wife. (Not sure if she’s going to fill them with soup or hot cocoa fixings.) Moly didn’t work but then I tried spray paint and that worked great:
Just had to wipe off a little residue with alcohol.
Need to be a little more careful with my masking, (it was a test) but happy with how it turned out.
-S
Those lids look great! Can you clarify if the green background is the color you painted and the laser removed the ink? What laser settings did you use?
Thanks to the help from users on this thread. I spent the last few days learning about tile burning and made a step by step posting on what I’ve done (I changed to Lightburn software rather than Luban): hopefully this helps others. I’m definitely still learning and barely know what I’m doing in Lightburn.
wow! That’s gret result!
So, you’ve just paint the surface with a green paint? Passing with the laser you get white color? I was supposed to get the original color before the green paint… mmmmhh
I’m confused about what is the relevance of the “material thickness” setting - do you set it to 0.8 cm for an iPhone case, or 20 cm for a wooden box? Or is the material thickness meant to adjust for cutting through the material?
Material Thickness + Focus Length = Height SM2 will set laser above platform
If you have placed a safety sheet under the object to protect the platform, then you would add that to the material thickness number you put into Luban.
Yes set the thickness for different objects as you use them in Luban.
There is bound to be a certain amount of burn in depth on a pass of the laser. Repeat the number of passes and eventually you cut through the material. Hence 4mm cardboard is 3 passes for the 1600mW laser.
For those that want to be specific and are measuring the distance the laser head is off from the object, the lense is a little way up inside the shroud.
Do I manually set z-height with the laser head touching the object, or do I need to move it up a bit for an offset (and where do I get that value? - I did see Laser Focus 23mm on my Luban software when connected).
That was just for initial calculation of focus length. That does not change again.
Yes the manual says touching object, video shows a piece of paper underneath for seperation. But again this is just for the initial determination of the focus length. As long as you put the material thickness in for each job the SM2 works out the z-height.
Is the origin different when using manual file load (eg work origin centered) vs image capture (work origin like 3D printing 0,0 at the front left edge)?
Yes, unless you have coincidentally set them to be the same. They are 2 different methods to achieve the same thing. Don’t start trying to combine them. But with the image capture work origin becomes irrelavant. -You just overlay your file/image over the top of the SM2 image capture.
Does image capture require it to be sent via wifi to the snapmaker? If I’m using image capture, how do I set the Snapmaker to the right z-height for the object to be engraved?
