I have been using the inkscape plug in to do some cutting. My problem is that it pulses the laser on and off like when raster engraving a dithered photo.
Is there a better vector cutting software then the inkscape plug in or is there someway to make it keep the laser on without the pulsing.
I’m using fusion 360 with my posts processor (search in the forum for it).
You can set up to 3 different power levels for the laser so you can engrave and cut in the same setup.
I have never used fusion 360 before. I was just thinking. Could I not use ESTLCam. After generating the gcode with estlcam I could search for the Z movements and replace them with laser ons and offs. I know its a bit of manual work but it should work
I got estlcam to work with the laser last night. Pretty simple. Put the cut depth to 0 and the clearance plane to 0.1 mm so there was basically no time between the laser firing and the z axis movement. Problem was it still seems to pulse similar to inkscape. Not as bad but still ended up with an un even cut. Guess i might need to resign to the fact that I need to do the little extra work for the drag knife.
I would think the movement speed would have a big impact on the results. Is the pulsing because it’s pausing, or slowing down?
I have it set to 900mm/min it must have something to do with speed and acceleration. As it seems to be worse in the corners.
Perhaps jerk needs to be increase for something like this.
I don’t know if you read my G00/G01 post, but the jerk is surprisingly not the derivative of the acceleration, it’s a speed, and below that value, the software doesn’t account for the acceleration when determining the speed to drive at. At the corners, it normally would be slowing down, and speeding up, limited by the acceleration. Any speed below jerk, doesn’t get that filtering. So if you set your jerk to 900 mm/min (I can’t remember the units on the jerk config value), then the software would immediately start pushing the stepper to 900 mm/min. Whether the stepper gets there or not, is going to depend on hardware things like the driver current setting, and the mass of what it’s moving. If it can’t go that fast, you will get skipped steps.
If jerk was 450 mm/min, then it would immediately go half speed, and ramp up to 900 mm/min based on the accel value.
So if you want immediate speed, with no ramping at all, then set the jerk up higher. But if you get any skipped steps, you’re screwed. If you want to reduce the amount of time it goes from low speed to max speed, you can increase the accel, but it will always be ramping up anywhere above the jerk setpoint.
I doubt there’s any solution w.r.t. predicting the speed it will be moving, and adjusting the power output of the laser. I also don’t know if it might make sense to plan to overshoot the corner, but turn the laser off. That would probably be worse problems…
max speed on my laser jobs is typically either 900 or 1200mm/min. So could probably turn the jerk up from the default of 4.