What's new in the release:

  • Beam opening correction for blocking projects
  • Sawing program validation
    • Lines that depend on out of range or skipped lines are removed from the final program
  • Correct handling of single-sided sawing lines
    • Side B is now exported to laser program for both single-side and double-side sawing lines
    • Validation correctly handles single-sided lines
    • Beam opening correction is only applies to single sided lines
  • Editing of sawing program parameters from Web UI
    • Point Step
    • Out Step
    • Offset (girdle only)
  • Minimum Carbon version requirement
    • Old Carbon version may upload broken sawing programs to the cloud
    • For this reason we implemented another safety feature - minimum carbon version validation after reco
    • If the carbon version you are using is too old - you will get an error with information about minimum version
    • right now the minimum version requirement is 3.1.15
    • during initial testing this version requirement will be soft - you will get a warning, not an error

IMPORTANT: In this release we switched to a different version of sawing program generation code. The update is major and we would recommend you to do a few sawing tests with (PCD or ceramic) to ensure that everything works fine and only after that proceed with regular sawing of diamonds.

Beam opening correction

In order to achieve maximum precision for blocking project it's necessary to take laser beam opening angle and minimum beam diameter into account when sawing. A picture below demonstrates an issue with laser beam opening adjustment and a plane correction that is necessary to address this issue.

In new version of SLIM we provide a feature that allows to apply such a correction to all blocking planes automatically. In order to use the feature you have to:

  • Specify the minimum beam diameter
  • Specify the opening angle in degrees (full angle, not half angle)
  • Check Apply correction

With this correction in place every single-sided plane in the project will be corrected away from the stone piece with the final diamond. Please keep in mind that this correction is only applicable for blocking projects. Using this correction for sawing projects is not allowed.

Sawing program validation

To address issues with stone damage we have added a sawing program validation step. Sawing program validation step ensures that the following layers are not included into the final program:

  • layers that are out of motor range 
  • layers that are in the wrong sawing order
  • layers that depend on any layer that can't be processed in this sawing (out of range, skipped or out of order)

This type of validation will reduce wasted time on the laser itself and make the process more safe. You can still bypass all validation and get all layers as before but this is strongly discouraged.

We recommend operator not to disable validation and to learn to prepare a complete list of sawing lines in webui and not waste time on the laser itself.

Single sided sawing

Before this update operator has to always use double sided mode for all sawing lines since the laser can't handle a single sided sawing line. It needs side B to do any kind of sawing. Before this release CSV files generated by webui in single sided mode did not include side B and they were unusable. From now side B is included for single sided sawing and for double sided sawing. 

Correct handling and marking of single sided sawing is required for the following reasons:

  • it's needed for validation: in order to know is sawing is within motor range it's necessary to know in advance if the sawing is single sided or double sided
  • in order to do beam opening correction it's necessary to specify sawing planes as single sided - only single sided sawing planes adjusted to compensate for beam opening angle

NOTE: At first operator may find this feature annoying. However without correct labeling of single sided vs double sided sawing planes it's impossible to perform validation correctly.

Sawing program parameters

It is now possible to adjust the sawing program parameters for any particular layers and for all layers. The default parameter values are taken from Carbon.

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