MAN!
This device is driving me crazy!!!
Now that I finally understood what others grasped much faster than me, i.e. that M3 is constant power, M4 is adaptive power, and that inline has no immediate connection to it, I thought I’m ready for repeating my experiments with the 2W IR laser on black acrylic and PCB etching. So I wanted to see if I could get true greyscale, repeating this experiment. Results were confusing, so I went back to systematic tests. Ran a test pattern - was rather surprised! See yourself:
Top row is constant power mode ON, bottom row has it OFF (Was running out of space, so had to squeeze the top row in)
This is test patterns done with Luban, not Lightburn. Looked into the GCode, and it is perfectly sane, the power settings should do 2,4,6,…,20% in both cases. But with constant power OFF, there’s obviously no proper power regulation.
I remembered this post by @Skreelink where he had it that trapezoid power seemed to be inverted - this I could not reproduce. Any square I created, be it with Luban or Lightburn, was behaving well.
Still, something is very odd with the adative power control of the 2W… And I was so happy that with the blue lasers it finally was all understood and working sigh
I’m back to really frustrated…
EDIT: Here’s the GCode if you want to peek into it yourself. I actually used the bottom two for the photo above.
TestPatternConstantPowerON.nc (119.6 KB)
TestPatternConstantPowerOFF.nc (119.6 KB)
TestPatternConstantPowerON-TextRemoved.nc (45.5 KB)