Unfortunately, there’s a reason that comment was only in the “back in time” segment and not in our crowdfunding campaign or anywhere else. We worked on the feature and could not get it to work well. We ultimately scrapped the plan and went with the direction we’ll be shipping: precalibrated materials with embedded barcodes for “it just works”, and the ability to test and save material profiles for your own favorite materials.
I’m sorry to hear that, @dan. I was really looking forward to an auto calibration. But I think @jacobturner has a good idea of what can be done.
Can some sort of calibration sequence be made where the GF will test engrave and cut a material and we can then look at the result ourselves and punch in information? For example, GF will try to penetrate a material starting with a low laser power setting in one section of the material and then move up gradually in power and sections of the material. Then at the end we can answer a question such as “At what lowest power level did the laser penetrate the material?” That way we don’t have to adjust settings manually. It can be a material calibration script. If you are familiar with the Robox 3d printer, it has a calibration script where it prints something and we use the output in calibrating the machine.
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Probably need to add some sort of a reflectivity test for the laser wavelengths also.
I will be disappointed if no feature is added. Doesn’t have to be as flashy as originally advertised.
Due to me being international I highly doubt I will be able to order many if any materials from you guys post launch(see if we can pre purchase an order of materials to fit in the box?, I know people want some free ones or the box to be made out of materials to cut but I would like to order some too but can’t afford more international shipping!).
The cloud share setting mentioned above would be a good compromise. (plus upvoting the material settings would help crowdsource materials to cut)
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Any clarification possible on “the ability to test and save material profiles for your own favorite materials.”?
Does this mean that I can manually enter various speed and power settings, check my results, and then write down what I am comfortable with in the program at the end? Or does it mean I can run a single “Test and save” command and the machine does the work for me?
I highly doubt the second, but it would be nice if at the least there was a pre-programmed “Cut Gradient” or similar feature, saving us the work of:
- place material inside
- Close Lid
- Tell program to cut a straight line at X speed and Y Power
- Align the straight line on material
- Run Cut
- Pull Material out, examine cut
- Return to #1, try slower or higher power
This is a fair amount of tedium, and I know that I would personally work on designing a single cut template similar to: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:728579
Or we could have a “test mode” or “chart mode” where it would make a chart like on the image below and we would see what it does on some settings.
This is for engraving, but we could also make it for cutting.
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Cool! Doing this yourself is really easy, but it’s a good suggestion to provide something for you to make it easier.
This is implemented as a drop-down material picker in the UI. You can save your own settings to it.
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There could also be a way for us to put our own bar codes on material, or something else.
I could just generate a bar code or QR code and print them on stickers, and when I come from the store I just pop them on the materials I bought. That way if someone else (like my girlfriend) would be using it, she just pops it in and it loads my settings 
Hm! Since this is going to be for my business how about this.
Since cutting things takes a while sometimes and I won’t be around but someone else will. And that the other person is not confused about where in the cutting process I left the shop and which pieces to cut next, we could do the following.
I start a project and have to load and cut 10 plywood planks.I am presented with 10 QR codes that I can print on a normal printer.
I just stick one of each on a piece of plywood and pop them in the GF.
The camera reads it and automatically loads the vectors/paths for cutting or engraving for that particular QR code.
I cut 5 plywood pieces, leave the shop, and whoever is left there to work can just pop the next one in and the GF will know what to cut.
This way we could also plan things in advance.
Or we’re engraving 2 mac books 1 iphone and something else. Print QR codes and stick them on the item. Then load it up in the GF, it loads the settings and image, we remove the sticker and hit print
This would be great for a good/fast workflow where 1 person is setting up the design and the other is cutting
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I’m wondering if there’s a solution here using crowdsourcing? Developing a list of vendors and materials and providing configuration data for other GF users via an online database.
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At the least, there will certainly be a forum post tracking such data.
Well… that initially. As soon as the amount of data becomes cumbersome for a forum post, I would hope it transfers to a Wikia or other more readily searched format.
Building the crowdsourcing into the interface directly would be tricky to make it look good. But placing a simple link out to an officially maintained wiki site for manual look-up of material wouldn’t hurt.
given as the data will be passing through the cloud there really isn’t a reason for it to also be stored there. may need some sanitization, but it should be stored and retrievable for other users. otherwise it’s like we’re asking for all the drawbacks of the cloud and refusing to take any benefits.
Two scenarios to consider if you are asking for community designed presets in the cloud:
1:
A menu of 10,000 links. To include a section like this:
Pallet Wood - 1/4" cut from Hollywood Construction Company - Untreated
Pallet Wood - 1/4" cut from Hollywood Construction Company - Dark Red
Pallet Wood - 1/4" cut from Hollywood Construction Company - Light Brown
Pallet Wood - 1/4" cut from Hollywood Construction Company - Rotting White
Pallet Wood - 1/4" cut from Los Angeles Building Supply
And proceed on with 2,000 variations of each and every type of material you can think of. Yes… users will ideally find that the settings from someone else’s work are sufficient to their own, but why remember which one of those 100 names was the right one, when you can save a new name you will always remember?
2:
Last night, you run a cut using the Cherry 1/8" preset. For engraving it ran at 1000 mm/sec and 40% power.
This morning, you run a job on Cherry 1/8" preset. But the engraving comes out as cuts! You check the history and see that someone typo edited it last night to 110 mm/sec and 40% power.
With a manual lookup, and personal storage, you have only the settings you personally use, and only you can ever change them. Yes… when working with a new material you need to stop and look up the numbers to enter. But you are already online (GF works, so we know this), and ideally have a direct link to the source of those lookup tables right there in the interface.
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@dan - Ideally I would like to see something in the software like a pre-loaded test pattern that would automatically locate the edge of your test material then ran a sequence of 1/8" squares 1/8" apart down the edge at different pre-determined power and speed settings so that you could then use calipers measure the depth to determine which speed/power combination was most suitable for your project.
I would think that including something like this would be both useful and very close to auto calibration. For a truly automatic setup, the macro camera might be able to go back and scan for depth after the cuts were made to build a “material profile”, but of course that might be outside the limitations of the software and/or the camera.
Thoughts?
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The automatic part of what you describe is exactly what we tried to do before concluding it wouldn’t work and switching to known-materials instead. : /
Unfortunately there’s no set of “trial cuts” that works for e.g. both tissue paper and 1/4" plywood without making a mess of things.
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I can certainly see that running a full series of power/speed combinations before looking at what happened would be problematic, given the wide range of materials that could be used. However, couldn’t it start at full speed+lowest power, look at what happened, and then repeat that process with successively higher settings until it reaches the settings that result in a full cut, and then stop? That is how we would likely do it manually on something delicate.
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Even a generic “calibration category” dropdown list-style setup would be a nice starting point to let you see very quickly how different materials might work. Like:
“Hardwood, 1/8” thick" (calibrated for walnut, maybe?)
“Hardwood, 1/4” thick"
“MDF, 3/16 thick”
“MDF, 1/4 thick”
“Birch Ply, void free, 1/8” thick"
“Birch Ply, void free, 1/4” thick"
“Birch Ply, void free, 3/8” thick"
“Ceramic Tile, glazed”
“Copy Paper, 20 lb”
“Construction Paper”
“Cardboard, Corrugated, Double Wall”
“Leather, tanned, 1/16” Thick"
“Leather, tanned, 1/8” thick"
You could have a dozen or so test patterns setup ahead of time using a grid similar to the one pictured above, or set to cut at the edge as I mentioned previously, and users could adjust speed/power and save them as custom materials settings. I wouldn’t expect that, for example, the 1/4" hardwood setting would cut maple, walnut, rosewood and bloodwood the same, as they are all obviously different densities and grain structures. But it would be nice to have some generic presets like the ones above so that users could really dive in. If the purpose of the Glowforge is to allow non-technical people operate a highly technical piece of equipment, generic presets that might work for a lot of materials would be a smart and forward-thinking pursuit.
I’m not saying it will be fool-proof, but it would be pretty easy for someone already familiar with the software and the back end code to setup a series of test patterns using different power and speed settings. If the end user has to create all of these from scratch, that could make the Glowforge nearly as tedious as one of the $1600 Chinese 300mm x 500mm 50w lasers that are all over eBay.
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Lots of good ideas here, from my CNC router and 3d printer experience I’d say I want my settings to be mine but a public spreadsheet or another database where we can share our experiences with materials would be great. At a minimum, it would give you a ballpark setting to start with that can be tweaked.
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I wouldn’t mind using public settings as a starting point for my personal, locked and saved settings.
Seems to me that incorporation of the new Scio near infrared detector would give the cloud based definition of materials and real time detection necessary for an automated system to work. https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/