Ok, new problem…when I adjust the speed on a raster operation, the speed of the machine doesn’t change. 50000 runs the same as 200. Fill Path and Cut speeds adjust as they should. It seems that only raster is not operating correctly.
A while back, I asked about the laser not changing power when adjusting in laserweb. I thought I fixed that issue as suggested by changing the pwm setting in the config file to 400 from 200. The laser adjust power now when changing the setting in the file operations, but not by much. It seems like the range is choked if that makes sense…at a setting of 1%, it still fires at 10 or so mA. 100% fires at 20 mA. I was testing an engraving on cardboard and it was burning all the way through, even at 1%. I had to manually turn the current regulator knob on the machine itself…
Thank you for your help on the gcode question about the laser firing intermittently! I think I have that one sorted out.
If that doesn’t help @Jim_Fong recently discovered a concern that his max speed in Smoothie was not going up when he increased the max rate, but when he then increased the default seek rate, it did.
Also I sent you a private message here on g+ @Aaron_Russell , just wanted to make sure you saw it.
I’m pretty sure he increased all the way up to 30,000, just so you understand the range. You can try some inbetweens, like maybe 10,000 would be a good start.
As for the other values, there is alpha beta gamma max rate, and then separately you will find x y z max speed. Again, 30,000 seems to be a good max here.
@Jim_Fong secondary data point on your discovery. @Aaron_Russell please elaborate on the exact outcome, and which values you used in config.
Pwm contrast will decrease with speed.
Between Smoothie and grbl-lpc it’s possible to run the machine somewhere in the 300-500mm/s range (rastering anyways) but a) the k40 will fall apart and b) you’ll get less and less grayscale resolution.
Per the pwm tuning guide in the k40 --> FAQ on my docs site can you try running those G1 lines with the various S values and report back? I care more about what value you observe on the meter for each S value.
I changed default feed rate to 10000 and default seek rate to 1000. When the laser was firing, it was moving at the speed I put into the operation, but was barely crawling in between laser firing. I increased the values to 30000 and 8000 and ran the test again and it is running perfectly from what my untrained and inexperienced eye can tell.
@Aaron_Russell Good someone else noticed this issue too. In my raster scan testing, it was the default seek rate G0 speed that was slowing down the operation. It was originally set at 4000 in my config.txt. When doing a programmed 400mm/sec raster scan, it was clearly not going that speed as compared to grb-lpc. I changed the default seek rate to 30000 and there was a noticeable raster speed increase. I was running the exact same gcode program from the sdcard
I haven’t had a chance to investigate this further but did tell Ray my initial findings.