Blue Laser computer problem

Sunday afternoon, I sent a job to Blue Laser. It accepted the job and cut fine, but the PC froze at the print screen. I had to use Task Mgr to kill Corel Draw. You PC freeze repeated every time I tried to print a new job, without the new job being sent to Blue Laser. Anyone else experienced this?

[edited to move to Space Teams>LASERS]

I’ve seen that problem come and go with PC’s sending G-code to machines and software updates. It’s often related to software hangs when there are multiple programs trying to access the same machine driver and only one can be in use at any given time. E.g. Octoprint, Slicer programs, Fusion360, Corel can all be configured to directly connect to a printer and can be running at the same time. Other times the software is expecting a response from the machine and Windows security/firewall/admin rights make certain communications only one-way.

I’d do a quick check of the software, print driver, and Windows revision ID’s and admin rights and see if others are encountering the same hang.

Less common causes can include unshielded USB cables that pick up too much interference when the machine starts printing, SD card corruption, or the printer firmware file being too close to the memory limit of the controller board and it mostly works but some command combinations like home, auto-calibrate, home, load bed height autocorrection which store a temp file and re-write to the firmware cause errors.

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From when I use blue which is not often, this occurs when you do not boot up the laser fully before opening corel.(something with the drivers causes this) you can check the laser is fully booted up by clicking the laser print dialogue and seeing that the play button is green. If it goes into lock like this you need to restart the laser and computer.

@mcmancuso might have more insight on this though

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Hey all, I’ve been getting this glitch recently as well on blue, to the point where none of my workarounds are working anymore and I actually can’t get it to print my stuff. Basically changing the print settings is causing coreldraw to hang at the print dialog. Anybody have any ideas on how to resolve this? If it were my machine I would just try reinstalling corel + drivers but I don’t want to screw anything up.

Rastering with the Image Density set to max- 5 I think- caused the machine to hang, for unknown reasons. That setting has no purpose on our setup really, so I haven’t really bothered with investigating it. You’d need to be doing engraving on aluminum with a 1" lens with a really tight depth of field for this to matter, and we don’t even use that hardware.

Hey Danny - thanks for the tip. I tried setting the image density down to four out of seven and it didn’t resolve the hanging issue. I found a super clunky workaround to get my job to go (adding a hairline object to my file so that corel wouldn’t think it was empty) but the issue seems persistent.

Make sure you’re using RGB palette not CMYK. CMYK’s file data for a “red” vector may not be recognized as a red-layer component (255,0,0) in the print driver, which interprets as RGB. In that case it will not be included under the red print settings, nor any other color, and the resulting job may end up blank.

I’ve noticed that it seems happier on the print settings screen if you have already opened the ULS print dialog (red icon in the tool tray). I didn’t get any freezing after doing this.

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