Glowforge CEO Dan Shapiro recently spent his Laser Thursday* making an oversized mousepad as an ode to the city that Glowforge calls home. For those wondering, he found the image on the Library of Congress website, which is a great resource for pubic access photos and other imagery.
The mousepad is made of laser-etched vegetable-tanned leather with a 1/8" wood backing.
*Laser Thursday: a weekly Glowforge staff after-hours event during which we order Chinese takeout and make projects on lasers
In case anyone wants the 160MB original TIFF…
That brings up a good point. What is the max file size? I checked specs briefly, but didn’t see it.
Nice work, and great image find, thanks!
Looks like the traffic was just as bad as usual…
OMG I have some great photos that I can’t wait to make! Come on 2nd QTR 2016! 
Max file size - haven’t capped it yet. We’ll see if/how people abuse it, and/or if there’s performance problems above a certain size.
Could we get a macro shot of the mouse pad to see the detail of the laser or a different project with a higher quality image to show off the glowforge precision? Thx @dan
Most web browsers and open source code won’t handle files over 2 Gigabytes correctly (some can, but most still can’t).
And some file formats are limited to 2 GB or 4 GB.
So GF will probably have to deal with those limits until they can write custom code to work around them.
We’re still making a lot of software changes that will affect the sharpness of the final image, so no, that’s not a good example.
Eh big deal, I made one of these by hand once. Kidding.
I posted this as oneupmanship when a friend mentioned nixie clocks:
“I have school of trained fluorescent / glow in the dark brine shrimp in a fishtank that contort themselves into the numbers. The time is subsonically transmitted into the tank by a transducer I hand wound from fine copper wire and toilet paper. It’s powered by dark matter. But I like the nixie clock too. My cybernetic cat built one of those once. Cute.”
