LaserCutterTroubleshooting

Learning Lessons as a Community

This page was created off the back of DoES community members (and other maker/hackspaces) sharing their knowledge. If you experience or solve a problem with the laser cutters, please continue that tradition by documenting it as best you can. If you need help using this platform, Github, please ask.

Solutions to common problems are listed further down this page - if they don't help, please create an issue ticket and:

• Provide details of the chain of events that caused the problem
  • sufficient detail for someone to recreate the problem
• Add a label (via option in sidebar) of Tool: Laser Cutter - Small (Sophia)
• Add a label Broken if it's a serious problem and nobody should use the machine until it's fixed
  • Otherwise, add a label Bug
• If the problem has been caused by a particular cut file, save it to the Error folder on the PC you were printing from, and mention the filename in the issue ticket

Troubleshooting Any Laser Cutter

The laser is constantly beeping, either immediately after turning on, or during a cut

• This is probably the water cooler.
• Stop laser cutting (pause if in the middle of a cut) to give the laser tube a chance to cool down.
• Check the water level in the tank, to make sure there's enough circulating around the cooling system. Ask someone if you don't know how to do this.

The laser cutter head is moving around but the laser is not cutting at all.

1. The laser cutters have a sensor in the lid to ensure that the lid is closed, Sheila in particular has had an issue with this sensor falling down although this has also been a problem on Gerald too.
2. All of the machines also require a good water flow across the laser tube. They have a flow sensor which detects that the water is moving so if the water is not flowing, most likely because the chiller/cooler is not turned on, then the laser will simply not fire and no cutting will occur.
   • A problem occurred with Sheila where the laser stopped firing mid-cut which turned out to be due to the chiller being off so Sheila may in fact not have a flow sensor (unless the chiller was accidentally turned off mid-cut).

Machine-specific Troubleshooting

Gerald

Sophia or Sheila

Shows Soft Stop on the control panel and emits double beep sound

• Generally you have placed the origin in the wrong place in Immediate mode or the artwork is bigger than the work area. (Note that someone else may have changed the origin from where you expect it to be)

Won't Datum properly; head plate continues past Datum point and makes grinding noise

• Hit Stop and check the metal bar at the back end of the mirror/cut head plate clears the screw at the top of the bed in the top-left corner; if it hits or scrapes the screw it won't hit the datum point...
• A gentle bend upwards should allow it to clear the screw

After importing a .dxf file, no cutting shapes appear

• Check your filename and folder names in the path to that file to make sure they are using only basic alphanumeric (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) characters; non-ASCII characters cause the problem (it will look like it's imported, but no shapes appear)
• Renaming the offending file/folder to use basic characters will fix the issue
• Make sure you open your DXF using File > Import in the LaserCut software, if you try to open the file directly from Windows Explorer you'll just get a blank document.

Tony