Laser engraving questions (10W)

Snapmaker 2.0
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Hi all, I got the 10W laser and wanted to branch out on my laser engraving and really like the NWT engravings I’ve seen. While I know the 10W isn’t necessary for some of these things, I figured I’d try to kill 2 birds with one stone and just learn everything with the new laser.

  1. I’m aware the laser engraving had a speed issue, but looking at the GitHub repository, there is a fix by brent113 (laser-inline-power) that was merged into the Snapmaker:main on 1/17/22 by scotthsl. This would have been before the “official” v1.14.2 from 1/13/22, and definitely before the GitHub “latest release” (v4.4.11 on 12/13/21). The confusing part to me is in the version history on v1.14.1 (12/13/21) and the GitHub v4.4.11 from the same date they both mention having “laser engraving speed optimization”, but this is obviously earlier than could have included this specific line of code.

In a previous life I would have been all about diving into the source code on GitHub, but I don’t have that time in my life anymore, and would rather spend my time working on making things with the unit. What is the most stable firmware available that includes that speed increase?

  1. Are there any other quirks with the 10W laser? I’ve seen some posts (e.g. by Alan Fox on the Facebook group) that they’re not getting as good results. I’ll play with calibration settings and hone in best I can, but figured I’d see if anyone had specific input.

  2. Luban vs Lightburn. Is Lightburn setup with the 10W any different than with the 1.6W? I had started going down the path to set up Lightburn when I first started using the 1.6W laser, but then decided to stick with Luban as I was primarily using the rotary module and couldn’t easily figure that out on Lightburn. I am willing to look into Lightburn again, but would love it if I could use Luban for one stop shopping.

  3. does anyone know of a utility for engraving on a tapered surface (e.g. YETI tumblers) so that the laser doesn’t lose focus? I had written a script to adjust the Z height based on the Y position, manually calculated by measuring the radius at different Y positions. It worked well, but I lost it and just recreated it in Excel. I could potentially write it again, but figured someone might know of a more polished version.

Thanks in advance for your input.

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The latest official version I do not believe contains my merged code. There have been some issues with the current state of the GitHub code that have been elusive to track down. For now I’d recommend sticking with the official release that does not contain it.

1 Like
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I kinda figured you’d say that :stuck_out_tongue:

I wouldn’t mind using the official stable release and compiling it with your code, but I can’t easily figure out what that release is on GitHub, since the version numbers don’t match up. Maybe for the best, though, as it has been over a decade since I did any compiling, and would probably brick my machine, but I hope your code gets added to the official “stable” (ha!) release soon.

4

The issue is more subtle than that. Something about the security they added makes it incompatible with light burn over USB. At least for one person they’ve gotten it to work by exporting from lightburn and running it from the touch screen.

Regardless I’ll add you to the group and you can read through all of the comments and decide for yourself, I have a pre-compiled version posted there of the latest code.

1 Like
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Thanks. I’ll take a look. I have literally written some gcode by hand to test settings, and then run it in various ways (eg USB stick, loaded through Luban over WiFi) so it would be interesting to see what part is causing the hold up. If the machine can read the gcode properly, and the gcode has the right settings (I haven’t looked at the inline power lines) it seems like it should work. Of course you guys are all way more experienced with this stuff than I am, so it is probably way more complex and nuanced.

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This seems to be related:

The movement from USB from lightburn might be triggering this “safety”