OK… I’m getting extremely frustrated here and I could use any help and suggestions you guys could give me.
Here’s a screenshot of the project I’m trying to carve…
the project is 16x25, I’ve done one carve of this size that came out great. this one has some more details than that one.
The following are pictures after the first pass…
As you can see, there are portions that were missed AND it looks like it shifted the carve in some portions and duplicated. I ran the g-code thru OpenSCAM and it seemed to simulate fine. Not sure whats going on here. Do I have some settings incorrect on my machine? Do I need to recalibrate? I’m at my wit’s end here, three large chunks of wood, 16x48, messed up now… I did some smaller carves a couple of days ago that turned out fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
It is difficult to be sure from the pictures, but my guess would be that you are missing steps due to low voltage to the motors. Have you adjusted the pots on the grbl shield for X,Y and Z?
When you have long travels on any axis any voltage issues will be more likely to show up. If the voltage is too low then the motor may stall when moving long distances. If the voltage is too high then you may have a thermal overload which will also cause you to loose steps
I’ve sat and watched it for quite awhile, and it doesn’t seem to be stuttering or anything as it’s moving, which I’m thinking it would be doing if the motors were cutting in and out, correct? The last mess up had an arc at the top of the carve that was left uncut, probably at least five passes or more of width back and forth. It went to the next layer befor completing that and I shut it down. You can also see where the image was carved and then it looks like it got duplicated just below or above.
It is very unlikely you will hear it miss a step, the noise of the spindle and bit cutting will mask the motor sound very well.
What spindle are you using? If it is the 300W spindle then you may be getting electrical noise from the spindle interfering with the motor signals.
Guess I’ll be trying some pot adjustments tomorrow morning. Do you have a method you use for this that makes it simple???
Angus… the pics you see are all on the first pass, that’s what is confusing to me. I let it run until it started the next depth pass. That being said, it seems on these larger carves I’ve attempted here recently, Easel is not generating efficient paths It seems there are alot of times the spindle is going back over territory it’s already carved, but until I get a succesful carve, it’s hard to say if that’s actually happening.
Allen, I am using the 24vdc spindle. I do have the 611, but Inventables is backordered on the mount presently.So right now I’m stuck.
You can test if you are getting interference by attaching a pen to the side of the spindle and then without a bit in the spindle and the spindle running have the X-Carve draw as large a square and circle as you can. If the square and circle are drawn correctly then your problem is most likely not electrical noise.
OK… adjusted the potentometers and am running the carve again. has done the initial depth carve and everything seems to be good so far. Much thanks gentlemen!
