My first post, be gentle. I’m getting frustrated with using the laser. Mostly I’m engraving on wood. The part of the process that drives me insane is the origin. I understand the concepts, but something isn’t working.
Here’s an example of what is causing me grief:
I have a square piece of wood 100mm x 100mm.
In Luban, I start a 3 axis project. 320mm x 350mm, origin in the center. Create a square shape 100mm x 100mm, centered on origin 0,0… Using the controls in the upper right.
I paste a simple png graphic and scale to fit inside the square. (My thinking is the the square represents my piece of wood … I ensure the image is centered visually in the square)
Then, I delete the square… It was only to frame my image. Create a tool path of the image, the view in workspace. Can see my origin is in the center, where it should be.
Send over wifi to my device. Go to the SnapMaker, accept the file, disconnect and start by opening the file. Use the “auto” method (because don’t quite understand the manual).
I have a small ink dot in the exact center of my wood square. I move the laser dot to be right on that ink dot. Set origin.
Start.
And here’s my problem: it doesn’t seem to respect the origin I set or follow the tool path relative to the origin. It always prints 10-20mm off center!
It seems that setting the origin on the exact center of my wood should make everything great… But it doesn’t! It always engraves off center!
What am I getting wrong here? Why isn’t setting the origin in the exact center of the work piece not good enough?
Not quite sure what’s going wrong. Maybe if you could share some screen grabs of what you’re doing in Luban.
Do you have the right machine chosen in Luban settings?
When trying to use camera capture things go wonky with work origin and how it displays, but since it sounds like you’re loading to your SM from Luban and then running from touchscreen the center of the workspace should be center of what prints.
Does your image have some extra border that perhaps Luban is seeing? What happens if you right click on your image to center it? Does it end up off center?
I’m not sure why you’re needing to create a square. The workspace has a grid with measurement markings.
I do, and it’s not. So I then have to guess where I should make the origin in order for it to print correctly… And guessing really shouldn’t be a part of this.
There should be no reason to guess. So something is wrong with your artwork or how you’re using luban.
FYI the laser default work origin isn’t the center of the platform. It’s off 10-20mm degrees. You did say you’re setting your work origin using the laser dot? (either by moving your material so it lines up or moving the head and then setting work origin on the touchscreen)
Thanks, all, for chiming in. I’ve gone back to basics and documented what I was doing so that I could be clearer here… and in so doing, think I found my problem. And the problem is a few things, including human error…
Telling SnapMaker to go to 0,0 does NOT put the laser in the CENTER of the platform. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t (as sdj544 alluded to).
Therefore, every time I use the laser, I have to manually set the dot on the precise center of my workpiece (so far I only use 0,0 as the origin).
#2 isn’t that hard – but I think I occasionally was forgetting to SET ORIGIN when I did that – and therefore the alignment was off (origin in the wrong place).
The work surface is 350 x 320mm, the center should be at 175,160. On my machine, it always defaults to an origin of 172.5,178.5 – which is NOT the center. (Is there a way to change the default origin?)
Therefore, my technique is to place my material in the exact center of the platform (which is easy for me – I’ve marked it off). Then I adjust the laser head manually to 163,160 – the laser dot is on the exact center of my workpiece and I SET WORK ORIGIN and start.
This process is now foolproof for me and my misaligned work is gone. Now… how do I get SnapMaker to ALWAYS automatically use 163,160 as the origin – so I don’t have to set it each time?
Afaik you cannot change the touchscreen behavior. You would need to add a short section of gcode at the beginning of the file.
If you were using Lightburn that would be trivial, you can set every gcode file you make to have a header at the top that commands the machine to go to that position before starting.
This is also where I enable backlash compensation before starting.
Your start gcode would be something like this
G53 G0 X163 X160 ; Move in machine coordinates to 163, 160
G92 X0 Y0 ; Save work origin
I have the same issue in my A350 as described, but in my case instead of being a few mm off, im using the background method from luban. Set a piece of wood on the center and set the work origin right in the center of the piece. when i send my work to the snapmaker and follow up the screen process even though the work center will go to the place i set it up when i run boundary will go all the way to the oposite corner of (0,0 - bottom left), run the boundary on the far right corner and not on my piece as desired. My only work around is to move the work origin towards (0,0) and run boundary untill it is in the desired location for engraving. Does anyone else have a similar issue? i just bough the machine and the first test box was great, not sure if the later update i did mess any settings for it.
im really new on this and any help would be really appreciated.
Thanks
Y
It is a software issue indeed. I have seen it reported elsewhere. It seems to happen only if you send the Gcode file over wifi. The only workaround is setting the work origin on the touch screen to 0,0 (X,Y). Always run a boundary to check. After over a year it is still not solved.
I am also a newbie and was trying to use the laser for the first time. I ran into this crazy boundary issue, exactly the same as yandirb, and your solution was spot on. After I set the work origin on the touchscreen to 0,0 things worked perfectly. Thanks for posting!
So I have this exact problem but when I set the work origin on the touch pad it still wants to start up at the top right of the table. I guess I don’t understand when you say you set the work origin to 0,0. Do you move the head all the way to 0,0 and it engraves where you initially wanted it to? Thanks in advance, CK
You can give my guide a shot if you want, it’s a touch dated, but it’s the general method I use for all of my projects.
Once you find your true origin, and can make a repeatable setup with it, it makes things so much easier. Once you can setup your true origin, then all you need to do is put G53 at the start of your gcode, and it’ll always start where you want. (G53 makes the program run in machine coordinates, completely ignoring the ‘work origin’ so there’s no fiddling or guessing).
