One of the things I hope to do is cut buildings for games and railway modellers.
Since these would be cut from pre printed sheets the registration for cutting will be crucial
So, just a plea that the software will allow very precise movement and rotation of the cuts to be lasered
Finger on an iPad isn’t going to be accurate enough so please make sure the software has the ability for very fine control
Ofcourse this soft off unction will be required for all sorts of applications
Agree,
Shift+ Arrows and Ctrl+shift+arrows is a must as far as I can see.
And maybe have it “Zoom” dependent as well for even better control.
Agreed, this would be a HUGELY helpful function in almost everything I’m planning on tossing into the Glowforge.
Great question. I’m in the printing wedding/invitation business and this is a great question! I use a Silhouette cutter currently and use registration marks on whatever I print so that the machine can cut in the right place. It’s very accurate.
I think @tony’s got this one in the feature hopper already, but I bet it would help him if you all could brainstorm some use cases so he can make sure the feature does what you need it to.
(One arrow press) = moves the selected object one pixel in that direction
(Shift+One arrow press) = moves the selected object 10 pixels in that direction.
(Shift+drag) = locks drag to 90degs.
(Ctrl+T) = Transform. Holding Shift locks rotate to 15deg increments (this would be great for wood projects where you want to line up grain)
The cool thing is the commands would be just like Photoshop, so nothing new to learn.
Clarification: so is this about how to move the cut file in position over the materials? Fine adjustment possible on a touch screen using the macro lens on the head?
@marmak3261 exactly right.
@spike has the right idea.
For cutting anything pre-printed you need pixel level movement and rotation.
On the desktop arrow keys and combo’s work fine - and ideally should either follow Adobe or some similar very popular software.
On the ipad I suspect it would need additional control buttons…
In both cases input fields where you could type numbers in would also be useful.
And yes, you would probably need a zoom function too so you can see.
So imagine you pre-print in one corner of your material a single pixel L shape
In your cut file you have a matching L shape
The advance course would allow for 2 registrations, top right, bottom left. This would help where either there was slight scaling issues (not sure how much variation you would get off different thickness of material for example).
It would also server as a double check - especially for rotation - which is the hardest thing to get right.
As for use cases - ANYTHING pre-printed: cards, boardgames, decorations, clothes, embroidery, stationery, dolls houses, pre-painted, adding engravings to something previously engraved, etc., etc.,
Also, there are probably a number of cases where you want to cut something, take it out and do something to it, put it back for further cuts.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I mean use cases for aligning with preprinted material.
What is helpful us “I (plan to) do things like A, B, C. Here’s how I do each one of them and here’s the goal. [optional] here’s how Glowforge software helps me do this.” The use case is much more useful to us than the feature recommendation. Hypothetical example:
“I engrave pencils. I want to put lots of pencils in my glowforge and engrave them. I have a spreadsheet with all the pencil text. I want them all engraved in a certain font. I want a feature where the glowforge detects pencils, then engraves all the pencils it finds with the next rows from the spreadsheet and deletes the last ones.”
We’re not going to implement a pencil-finding feature, but we might be able to generalize from this + many more use cases some features that would make the use case work.
I want to cut some acrylic into a strange shape (say a heart) then I want to take the heart and paint it red (with laser safe paint of course) then I want to stick the heart back into the Glowforge and engrave my moms name into the heart. Then I will take my heart with my moms name and backlight it so the her name glows.
I guess it would be for me to be able to take something out after cutting/engraving, do some process then put it back in and run the rest of the job. It could maybe laser on some alignment marks or something.
For me, my specific use cases
All of these involve pre-printing, effectively using the GF as a die cutter.
Process would either be printed paper laminated to another material (heavy card or mdf)
Or
Pre printed birthday/wedding cards, brochures etc printed to heavy card (often both sides) using GF to cut out sections and patterns
But… fine resolution placement of cuts on material is the key.
Where using a finger on an iPad is not going to be precise enough and fine “vernier” control is needed
Agree!!!
Glowforge may be able to do some nifty things beyond this… but to address these two specific use cases:
@markwarfel: Leave the bulk material in the printer undisturbed (use a razor blade or exacto knife to pick out the heart) and you can place the heart back in the exact same spot it had been. So you can use one file that has the heart outline and the inset text, run only the outline, rip the heart out of your glowforge (sorry, had to say it that way), then paint, re-insert, and run only the inset.
@sqw: Pre-prints should work marvelously with the camera registration. Just be sure to print the outline of where you want to cut, and tell the Forge to cut on the inside of that outline. The printed outline is not left on the final product to give away how it was done.
Exactly what I conceived as a work around. While I was writing that ridiculous example I was thinking how I would do it if there didn’t have this feature. I mostly want it to be able to read registration marks. You could even place a QR type sticker on something for it to align.
This is great stuff, folks. Definitely a lot of awesome ideas here!