During class last night, we ran into a problem where parts of the user interface in Retina Engrave 3D were being disabled. The controls for setting raster power, for instance, were grayed out, and some (but not all!) of the menus at the top of the screen were also unresponsive.

It’s not too unusual for the laser software to get confused and need to be closed and restarted. That didn’t help. We tried closing and restarting CorelDraw, too, without success. We tried closing and restarting both at the same time. We even tried rebooting the computer. Nothing seemed to help.

Then Laura suggested power cycling the laser itself. That worked! We were all surprised, since it isn’t at all obvious that the laser software even talks to the laser before starting the job (beyond the connection monitor in the lower left corner, that is), but apparently it does.

So, when things go off the rails in a bizarre way, don’t forget to try power cycling the laser.