Help with Meerk40t v0.6.7 please

I love the fact that people like Tartarize and Scorch spend time developing these control programmes and then open them up for everyone to use, thank you,

I have been tinkering with meerk40t for the last few days and have some questions and observations.

  1. I have cropped an image in Inkscape (using Object/Crop/Set) but when I bring it into meerk40t, the bit I cropped off is till there. Reload it back into Inkscape and it’s the cropped image I created. Any ideas?
  2. Is there an undo/redo facility in meerk40t, or one in the pipeline?
  3. From this photo of a Rasterized scan you can clearly see a white line going across my forehead. Any idea what might have caused this?
  4. When I use K40 Whisperer to vector cut, the cutting head traverses between cuts at top speed and then returns to cutting speed for the next cut, but with meerk40t the speed remains at the cut speed throughout. Is this the way it is or am I missing a setting somewhere.
  5. Minor irritation, not serious. When I launch Meerk40t the upper left corner of the window is somewhere around the middle of the screen so that I have to reposition the window and make it full screen.
    6, what is the mm value of the raster steps for my K40 laser with the stock board?

Your thoughts would be much appreciated as always.
Dunc

  1. The SVG cropping with clipArea doesn’t work. I didn’t think it would be as big as it is.

  2. There is no undo/redo or current plans other than the knowledge that it’s needed. Currently control Z reset the matrix. This will sometimes emulate and undo but it’s completely different.

  3. Looks like the y-step skipped.

  4. That is currently being fixed. There’s a quickly fix in 0.6.8 but it’s properly to be fixed in 0.7.0.

  5. I likely should just add that for the main window. I can tell it where to launch things and it already maintains the size.

  6. The stepper motors and values on the stock board are both in mils. 1/1000 of an inch. The raster step as is well. That’s why it also gives DPI as a unit since it’s dividing 1000 by step amount.

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The forehead line might also be banding if you have some devices like an air assist that turns on a compressor here and there on the same circuit, but it’s usually more of pronounced banding.

David,
Thank you for your reply, very helpful. Regarding the svg cropping, I have just tried a work around which seems to work. Do your clip area cropping as normal in Inkscape and export as a .png file. Then open the .png file in meerk40t.
The image stays clipped, although the cropped area is still there it is not visible, just the image area you want. When you ‘Start Job’ the laser head goes to the start of the visible image area and ignores the transparent cropped area.
Dunc

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Awesome. I’ll double check that and recommend it. I didn’t think this was going to happen as often as it does. I didn’t think much of clipArea. But, apparently it’s pretty frequently used. A solid work around is a very nice thing to know.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Where can I find end-user documentation for Meerk40t?