Help with Blue Laser Use

Space Teams LASERS
1

I am a newbie to Blue Laser (or any laser machine) and attended the intro class by Matt and did try out a few small things on the laser. But when I went in today I had a feeling the focus wasn’t right or I may be not doing the right things to get it to engrave/cut wood sheets (3/16"). Can someone please help me learn more about using the Blue Laser? Are there any manuals or tutorials I can use? Could the focus be off if the machine was used without the bed by another user? Are we supposed to reset it? How to use the focus tool? So many questions… :grinning: …

2

I tried to use the blue laser this afternoon (Tuesday) as well, and the machine is moving as expected but the laser is not being produced. I’m also new to the machine, but did successfully engrave a few times last week. Using the same settings as last week, the laser is now not being produced. I tried turning off and on a few times, and still no laser. Is there a specific setting/button that needs to be checked to ensure the laser is produced?

This is surprising given the laser discussion yesterday, which seemed to indicate the blue laser was working fine.
(yesterday’s discussion here:
Laser's - what's working?)

3

There’s no “laser off” setting I can think of. I’ll look tonight

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4

I haven’t experienced this before with Blue, but I know with Red sometimes the door doesn’t get registered as closed which would result in the machine going through the motions without the laser actually firing. Not sure if that’s something that might be at play here.

Thanks for going to look @dannym!

5

Are there any basic tutorials/manuals that we can look at if we have some questions while using the laser?

6

I did a test fire and it did laser.

Looking at the last job left on the PC (big help BTW please try to do this when you have a problem!) I see a red square in vector format, and the red layer is set for rast/vector 83% speed, however the width of the vector is not Hairline.

This means the layer will be interpreted as raster, despite being drawn as a vector. The layer allows vector and rastering, so the work will feed through and appear on the control panel and go to the laser.

However rastering does not cut and rastering at 83% will probably not produce visible marks so it may appear as if the laser isn’t on

Always set your vector work to “Hairline” or it will become raster. And if your layer setting only allows vector, then vectors wider than hairline don’t appear on the laser control panel window when you go to print

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7

Ah I see, that’s my fault then. Matt definitely did mention needing the line width to be “hairline” during the training. Thanks so much for your help Danny!