Laser Keeps Resetting

[David Sabot]

I have a Mercury 25 watt engraving machine. The unit is hooked directly to an outlet and recently started producing strange behavior.

On certain files, when we send them to engrave, even if there are no other jobs on the machine, it will allow us to start the job, and then a few second in, the machine restarts. I can't pinpoint a specific file it does this to, as sometimes we rerun the same job and it works, then the next time it restarts the machine.

Mercury technical support thinks it could be either faulty memory or circuit board. Any other ideas/advice?

[Richard Rumancik]

Have you explored the "bad memory" theory? First try reseating the memory - remove, clean contacts, and replace. If that does not work then try with different memory. The old Mercuy machines used PC-memory 1990's vintage. Don't know if your machine is like that or not but check the sticks you have and also verify with the manual what is permitted. In any event you have to start somewhere.

You could try reloading the machine firmware. What version of Mercury do you have (also how old is it) and what firmware do you have on the machine? Also which driver are you using on the PC?

When you say the machine "restarts", do you mean it goes back to the beginning of the file and replots it? Or do you mean it actually powers down?

If it is powering down, perhaps the power supply that runs the mainboard is intermittent. If you lost power to the mainboard it would likely reboot.