Grayscale on Maple

Manually compiled the firmware on github since they merged inline and plopped it on my F350 and gave it a run.

305mm (12") square, 19mm (3/4") maple plywood. 2000mm/m, 5-75% laser power, 0.14mm interval. 5 hours, 57 minutes.

Bonus is my cat on 12mm baltic birch on the side.

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Are you using some different software than what’s bundled with Snapmaker?

Yes, I’m using Lightburn with Marlin inline settings.

Hey shreelink,

Can you explain in a few more words how you ceeated this amazing piece?
I will appretiate that to do something similar. I have the 10W laser but my attempts to laser grayscale Images were really frustrating.

Best

@Wyphorn
Prerequisite is to compile the firmware from the github and flash it to your snapmaker. This is because the current version (1.14.2) does not include inline power control enabled. It’s a semi-recent addition to Marlin. However, the change HAS been implemented in the code on github.

They include decent, but not entirely correct instructions on building the firmware. Specifically this:

git clone git@github.com:Snapmaker/Snapmaker2-Controller.git

This did not work for me, so I just used the regular clone method with the url.

Afterwards, compiling was fairly straight forward. I’m not responsible if anything goes wrong, please research on how to upgrade or downgrade your firmware incase anything goes wrong or doesn’t respond correctly.

What inline does, is let the laser change power as the toolhead is moving, without it being enabled means the toolhead stops every time it changes power. Also, the default way Snapmaker does ‘grayscale’ is dithering and making dots, which is why it stutters and takes so long.

After flashing the custom built firmware, I setup a Marlin device in Lightburn with the proper dimensions and used these settings:


While you need to do your own tests for min/max (values used for pure white/pure black), speed, density, etc for the material you choose, the important setting is image mode as grayscale.

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