Was kind of hoping there was a CAM topic entry here for FlatCAM, I'm just a "johnny-come-lately" with one of these Chinese 3018 GRBL 1.1h machines (like a Genmitsu/Sainsmart), I'm generating double-sided PCB layouts with KiCAD (using freeRouting the autrorouter, and whatever its "native" trace width is) and FlatCAM, and trying to make sure I can account for all the mistakes I made today. Actually I'm pretty happy so far but I was watching the following YouTube describing how to set up for the engraving part, and I'm pretty sure he said 3 passes at 25%:
so it came as very much a surprise that when the engraving bit was attempting to isolate the traces from each other, there was basically zero trace width left [and no I didn't enable autoleveling, I don't quite understand it (I'd sure appreciate it if someone could link a decent description) and the largest board dimension is only 3" anyway]. This was with the "blue steel" engraving bits from Amazon, I noticed there were a few more of a slightly different nature sent with the machine itself, and somehow I would up with a third package of 10 as well. I "assume" these are all 0.1 mm width and 30 degrees and other than the color they all look the same. What would be absolutely terrific would be if someone could give me a reasonably accurate formula explaining the relationship between "native" trace width, degrees of bit angle, # of passes, % retrace and final trace width, or if you don't have that if you could just give me settings that "seem to work OK" for you, and maybe what else to watch out for in order to get consistent results?