I’ve noticed a lot of people complaining about alignment issues, and I’ve had my own series of troubles. So I thought of a way that could solve part of the problem.
The top camera is nice for getting a full-bed image, but we all know the difficulty in getting that to work out on a smaller scale. So what if to augment the full-bed image, we could select an area for a higher resolution view and the GF uses the tracing camera to do a pass over that area? Most times, if I can get a reference point within a square inch or so then the rest of the design self-references and everything is fine. Rarely would the area need to be very big, so the extra set-up time wouldn’t be THAT bad.
This is especially important when we’re engraving on a separate thing, and not just doing the whole project out of one sheet. Often times, the thing we’re engraving on is expensive and you only get one shot. (I just wasted a $20 part because the alignment was off, and that’s even AFTER using a dummy blank to test alignment. I’m still trying to unpack what caused that, so not blaming GF for it yet.)
Sort of. I think @nic.fouts is talking more about a way to indicate a certain area of the bed for the camera to specifically focus on for running some calculations to get better focus in that particular area. Seems doable – I think it’s a good suggestion.
I’m not real certain what SnapMarks provide since I’m not a lucky recipient, but from what I’ve read they still don’t fully solve the problem (at least my problem). If they can maybe combine the two technologies then I’m not opposed to that. (You know, assuming I’m able to get that feature.)
I think Glowforge is going to have to do stuff similar to this to fully enable the use of the passthrough slot. In fact it sounds a lot like some of the stuff they mentioned back at the beginning of the project . I’m sure the camera on the head will be used for a lot more at some point. But as with everything on Glowforge we’re just going to have to sit and wait and see what happens.
