My machine will spend most of its life making signs.
KH 3020B 40 watt laser with some awesome upgrades the previous owner installed.
My question :
What is the format to bring in documents created in inkscape that has the fastest burn time. I have been saving them as.png.
The signs below are pretty typical. They are about 3" x 12".
The time on the laser bed is about 20 minutes. I tried trace to vector but the outline is not the look I am after.
Plan is to make custom signs while customer waits.
I don’t believe the format (raster image ) will change the speed in which you setup the operations.
Either tell it to go faster or test using a bigger laser diameter ( default 0.1 ) that will defenetly make it finish sooner
@Ariel_Yahni_UniKpty If you use an upgrade the controller, can’t you get the better software options to individually engrave the letters? Guess it would have to be converted to curve data rather than an image format though.
In the files section, where you select the different parts of your design for laser cutting or engraving, the default action is “Laser Cut”, when you click the dropdown, it gives you several other options (Laser Cut Inside, Laser Cut Outside, Laser Fill Path, and a few others (including milling options)).
Select “Laser Fill Path” to do a filled vector instead of just the outline.
Most of the settings there are identical to “Laser Cut”, but one important extra field is the “Line Distance”, set that to the width of your beam at the burn surface. (Usually that will also be your focal point, but sometimes it makes sense to be out of focus intentionally to get a wider, less concentrated beam)
One of the things you can do to improve Gcode generation time is splitting the project in multiple actions… It somewhat disrupts the optimization if you do too many actions, but only a single thread (core) can work on a single action at a time, so by splitting the actions in to multiple, you can have more threads actively generating Gcode (up to 5 IIRC)
@Ariel_Yahni_UniKpty , in my experience it depends on the content, but for signs like the above, the only difference would probably depend on the controller due to the max throughput issue with Smoothie compared to GRBL…
Also a raster fill might possibly be more consistent, depending on the type of laser, than the “a bit here, a bit there and back again” process of laser fill…
M%$#%ing 3 is all I needed. 3 days toasted.
So is this a default in LW4 to end the gcode with M5 i take it.
I opened up and looked at my LW3 files and there was no M5 there.
When I launch LW4 it opens in a very generic frame. I had LW3 as a saved link on my favorites in Chrome. I was used to opening several workspaces at a time.
what is the default porogram that opens LW4. photo attached.
I understand this is best used in Chrome. How do I default that.
When i click on help in the current window and come to the community I have no back button to bring me back to my LW4 workspace. I have to close the page and relaunch LW4.
My learning curve is growing fast. Thanks for your input Ariel Yahni and others.
My first computer was a Vic20 with a tape drive…no hard drive.
took me a day of writing code to make it generate a tone. Took me 3 days to get it turned off.
My third computer was an 8088 with a 20 meg harddrive stacked to 40 meg. people came over to see this huge monster…
last laptop was a custom video rendering machine.
Newest laptop is a Intel Core i5 8th gen with a touch screen…dont game so didnt need i7.
I remember when windows 3.1 came to me on bootlegged on more than 20 single sided floppy discs.
Built 5 or 6 computers from scratch.
Does not make me a code expert.
Just need to get pointed in the right direction before my mantra kicks in…
“I DO MYSELF” (bulldozer mode)…translate I restored my computer to factory yesterday after chopping stuff up and wandering to 2 or three other junk softwares and drivers.
Thanks you guys for keeping me from doing brain surgery with a bulldozer
How do I get LW4 to open in chrome? the window it opens in by default has no opportunity to open other tabs. once I click on the help and get to the community page there is no back button. i have to kill the app and reopen LW4.
