Tarkin: Minor, repeatable wobbles in vector curves + angled lines

@Stephen-L-M and I did a little more simple line+fill pieces in baltic birch last night. It mostly came out very nice, but there are some minor wobbles in the line etching that don’t appear in the source vectors. The wobbles are very small, so definitely not “showstopper” issues for this particular project, but figured it might be useful to post so perhaps we can all learn how to better tune things.

I don’t have the exact speed + power settings that we used handy right this moment, but @Stephen-L-M can post them here shortly.

See photos below.

Below: Source vectors. They are quite simple and clean.

Below: 3 identical pieces, all cut with the same settings. Calipers shows that individual vector curves are in the 5-10mm size range. I also took the photo of 3 pieces to show that the observed wobbles don’t appear to be due to physical material variations: the wobbly line locations are very consistent from piece to piece.

Below: Zoomed in shot highlighting some slightly wobbly lines that should be straight.

@dannym, You had previously mentioned some ongoing tuning of the Ruida control parameters around acceleration, etc? Do you think that would be relevant to this kind of result?

I cannot attach files to the forum, so I posted the file on my G drive. There are only two layers in this file… James is talking about the “fill+line” layer.

@dannym In a tangent topic, you might want to add these two layers to your materials library on Tarkin. These are both for 1/4" baltic birch… the cut layer that you have in the materials library right now doesn’t work for 1/4"… I think you saved the 1/8" as 1/4". And the library doesn’t have a good “fill+line” material at all.

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Most likely this could be reduced by tweaking the overall machine settings. I’ll have a look, these parameters do affect overall speed.

I didn’t have a 6mm Baltic birch entry in the library, but the 1/4" Birch prefinish worked just fine. I added an entry for 6mm Baltic Birch though.

LB has a complication in creating “Fill+Line” settings. The Line part’s parameters are unfortunately shared with the regular Line, which we normally understand to mean cutting through. If we create a Fill+Line setting that uses a thin engraving line, loading that up entry, change to Line and try to cut, this will instead give a very shallow engraving line.

Plus, “Fill” could be quite a range of possibilities, as depths are a matter of preference. Some users are just looking for a color change, not depth. But we could have at least a starting point.

We could put in a feature request to LB devs, but I’m not sure what resolution is best to even ask.

We could just have a “Fill+Line in all Wood/Plywood” in “Shallow/Med/Deep” versions in the library that gives some sort of result out of the box. It won’t matter what thickness the material is, as long as the Fill doesn’t blast all the way through. For that matter the differences with the particular type of wood/plywood won’t need to change because it doesn’t promise a specific depth anyways.

Acrylic, on the other hand, a “Fill+Line in Acrylic” can be “0.5mm/1mm/2mm” depth, as acrylics do mostly cut to a similar depth regardless of type. Colored acrylic will cut a bit shallower but probably not an important difference.

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