Introduction

There are many applications that needs to run faster than usual. Especially rastering and high-resolution movements.

There are several factors which slow down the system:

• By default, ECM2 takes 1 ms to execute each line of Gcode. This is due to the "Servo Thread", which limits the maximum speed to 1000 instructions per second (obviously).

• [Put other reasons here]

Consider the following picture:

This is a laser engraved wood. The original photo has millions of pixels, where each pixel has different gray intensity.

For example, assume that the picture has 300x400 pixels (giving a total of 120,000 pixels). How much time does it take to EMC2 burn this wood in rastering mode?.

Rastering mode means move to the next pixel and update the laser power rapidly in one axis. This means that you must execute two instructions per pixel: updating position and laser power.

Assuming that the motion between pixels is immediate (which is not true.), we have: 2 instructions per pixel X 120,000 pixels X 1 ms = 240.000 ms = 2 minutes.

Is this fast or slow?. Well, typically the resolution of laser engravers is greater than 1000 dots per inch. Assuming a resolution of 1000 dots per inch, then this photo would be 0.3 x 0.4 inches.

2 minutes to engrave something so small!. Assuming that the motion between pixels does not takes time!!.

The aim of this article is to reduce these delay times, and send instructions to a reasonable speed for these applications.

Speeding UP the Servo Thread with SMP