I have used the sienci labs laser module before and made 30 lasered vane boards. I havent used it since then and designed a project today and tried to run it. Same setting as before 25.4mm/sec and 100% power and it barely makes a mark on the wood. I have cleaned the lens, verified the focus and tried playing with the speeds and power on gsender while running test pieces. The only difference is I am engraving on pine instead of plywood. Is that the difference or am i missing something else?
@Phildo Are you creating in Lightburn? What happens if you run directly from LB and not gSender? Could your feed rate settings have changed? LB recommends mm/min for a diode laser, not mm/sec. At the speed you are running, I would not expect to see any marks on the pine.
@Phildo It’s really hard to recommend settings for a laser. I don’t have your laser module. I don’t know which lens you are using and I don’t know how you focused it. (I think that I’ve covered myself pretty well here, don’t you? )
I would suggest that you burn a test grid in LB on the same material that you are using for your job. Before doing that, I would suggest that you run the ramp test to determine if your focus is optimal. You can find details of both of these tests on LAHobbyguy forum.
I could post my test grid file, but my setttings in LB are not the same as yours, so I don’t believe that it would help you much.
As an added complication, if you prefer to export your gcode from LB to gS, you must ensure that the settings in the two applications WRT to max speed are the same. That’s why I started out by recommending that you burn directly from LB. If your settings work there, you will know that you have an issue with your gS settings.
)