Pictures, hopefully will upload in a separate post this time

The forum is a little bit cranky and every image / attachment posted needs to have a unique name (which has not been used by anyone before).

I have checked your Gcode file and it all looks OK. I ran it with my laser and no problems. Exactly why your laser is refusing to turn off quick enough on the final home move is, at the moment, a total mystery to me. Perhaps you could attach another problem Gcode file for me to try.

Tweakie.

Thanks, the one you ran was one that worked for me ok.
It was a new one made up to see what happened.
Attached is one of the problem GCode samples

Here is a short video showing laser restart at a higher power setting after finishing the job and then running a short distance before shutting down again.

https://youtu.be/pKWcWo7y99I

Thats a very inefficient piece of Gcode with multiple passes which cut through in places but other than that it worked just fine. The laser turned off when it should.

Question: Do you have a genuine Mach3 license and is it registered in your name ?

Tweakie.

Yes a genuine copy registered in my name, have been running it for years.
My laser has a very fine focus of 0.1mm so to do the infill in the letters required a lot of passes and it’s set to full power as it’s to be run on a black anodised piece of aluminium for a face plate.
I’d run it with power turned down to less than 10% as a test run on the wood.

I did regenerate that code as the ones that caused problems I had been altering the finishing code to see if I could fix it.
I’ll run that exact code I sent you and see what happens. I couldn’t see any difference from the original but I’ll give it a go.

Hi Tweakie,
Well I ran the code that you ran and had no issues with it so I guess this is going down as one of the unsolved mysteries as nothing had been changed. I checked the two lots of code and the matched so I don't know.
I have had a couple of other issues show up since getting the laser operating.
The first is after running some Gcode for the laser Mach3 fails to shut down fully giving an error message after it appears to have shut down, "Mach3 has stopped working" with the usual list of faults that only a software engineer would understand and as the computer isn't network connected I cant let it look for a fix.
Today while running the full length Gcode for the job I was having issues with and fortunately just a test run on wood I had an ESS buffer under run in the middle of a move tripping the watchdog.
The font had been changed and also the infill had been set to hatch to see how that went. Lots of very small moves so it would have been running the buffer pretty hard.
Anyway thanks for your help Tweakie
I will ask one other question, is there a more efficient way of doing the infill with the laser?

After your comments I think all the problems you have been having relate to the ESS rather than Mach3.
It’s some 3 or 4 years ago now but I had issues using the ESS with my lasers and after much trial and assistance from Greg & Andy at Warp9 my final solution was to switch to using the AXBB-E and UC400ETH motion controllers for all my machines (rotary spindle & laser). Sad outcome really but all of Warp9’s efforts are now being put into Mach4 and Mach3 is just history.

In industry where speed is of the essence filled laser text lettering is usually done by raster engraving and only where the highest of quality is required is the outline vector engraved as a finishing touch.
So learning from the professionals…
For my laser work I now raster engrave almost everything and find it much faster and easier to just go from a high resolution or large size .jpg (or other bitmap) image of the text I require then scale it to suit the workpiece at the time of rastering. I appreciate that this method would not suit everyone but it works so well for me I have never looked back.

Tweakie.

Interesting Tweakie,
I have never used rastered images for the cnc or anything else that I can recall so I'm not familiar with how the machines handle it so I'll have to read about that.
I would have thought that for infilled text that the laser or tool still has to cover the same amount ground to get the to the finished infill for flat text.
Unfortunately being retired now and doing some expensive house renovations I cant justify the cost of a new controller at the moment.

I've had absolutely no issues with the ESS and its been running my machine for more than seven or eight years. I can still try the latest recommended ESS plugin for my setup and see how it goes.
Other than that not much else I can do other than running smaller sections of code to do the job in steps rather than a single file, not sure that would help but I'll have a play with it and do some test runs to see what it does.

Thanks again for your help.

Nico.

For those who had been following this thread I've had success for the most part, I guess 99%.
One remaining issue since activating the spindle function to control the laser is Mach3 still won't shut down properly after running some laser code.
As for the laser function itself it's working extremely well.
A couple of other little problems with the laser not restarting when stopping and goto zero followed by a regen tool path and cycle start.
Re-loading the gcode with the machine at zero and all works fine.

You will see in the test pictures I was trying different step over settings to get a clean burn image on the Anodized panel.
I had to slow the feed rate to 500mm a min to avoid buffer under run issues with the ESS and it helped with a better burn finish as well.
Very happy with the final burn job as is my mate who I've done it for.
The laser over run I was having issues with at the start has mysteriously gone away, will probably never know why.