So others have reported laser dropout at high speeds, however mine seem to limit the speed itself…
I have tried to run a few greyscale-images now with different speed setting, without any visible image difference.
First, I made a calibration card to get a feeling for what speeds and power settings could make good results (see attached and ignore my handwriting). Based on the calibration cards I figured somewhere between 30-40mm/s (1800-2400 mm/min) would be decent and save a lot of time. Going to print however - speeds are greatly reduced.
So then I did the only reasonable thing: went with even higher speed! haha - well, to no prevail, engraving was just as slow (and dark).
Now, my theory is that the information transferred during a greyscale (large variation in power produce very long gcode files) is just too much for the printer to handle and thus are not able to run any faster.
I use lightburn to produce the files, but when engraving - touchscreen on pritner states 2400mm/min, yet moves considerably slower.
From measuring the speeds, actual speed is around 5mm/s (300 mm/min)(!).
Not at all.
See attached below.
Note that i deleted a huge chunk in the middle (around line 20 000, and almost until the end), to make it smaller and thus able to upload.
Photos and video
Here are some photos I took during the process.
The piece of wood is apporixmately 90mm across, and the printer is etching about 50mm or so of those.
The engraving speed is definetively not as the screen is stating, and I am not sure what the discrepancy is caused by.
You exported an image from Lightburn using grayscale huh. Can’t do that lol. Enjoy reading this journey: Laser Pause While Changing Power
Anyways, literally just this morning I “finished” fixing that bug if you want to help test it. No guarantees it doesn’t break anything. If you want, PM me and I’ll walk you through what needs to be done.
Otherwise you’ll have to use dithering or half-toning. Can’t grayscale with the stock firmware. It stops and starts after every single line of code, which is why it’s taking so freaking long.
