I’m wondering how people deal with alignment on the machine. There are several operations where it’d be nice to have a jig, but I’m currently doing alignment manually.
My current process is align the material to the honeycomb using hold down pins, and then aligning the design with a dummy shape in the viewer. This works, but it does take time.
I’m a pretty disappointed to learn about snapmark and that they discontinued that. I’ll be brutally honest, and I think that was a really poor decision. I can’t think of a good reason that they discontinued it, except maybe liability of people blaming it for ruining a job.
I have found that the camera alignment, along with the placement and distribution tools have made alignment quite good. For absolute precision, however, a jig is the only way to go.
I’ve been putting off doing the alignment as the stock seems pretty good. I’m able to get pretty good results by aligning things manually using the camera, but it does take time. I do occasionally have some failed jobs, but they’re usually due to alignment before focusing…
I did just watch the video about using paper and magnets for aligning material. I really like that idea, and I’ll probably try it out.
The other idea I had was to peg some material to the honeycomb for a repeatable jig. I might even put my own fiducials on for manual alignment for reusing the jigs.
The camera has a fisheye lens. The best alignment is achieved by focusing and placing your artwork directly under the camera. Do you use the placement/distribution tool? Do you use set focus before placing your artwork?
Snapmarks was only ever a beta release, and machines that had it still have it as far as I know.
Tell me about it. I bought the glowforge based in part on the snapmarks as a feature I expected to get. I eventually got it in another beta, but it’s SUCH a useful tool that I think they should have pursued it further for everyone.