Not sure about the fresh from the factory as these are shipping from GFHQ directly. As for warpage.The original batch I got from them with the unit are pretty flat. The batch after that had some warpage out of the box. The batch after that all hell broke loose as in warpage, mislabeled sheets and missing pre-mask. In that batch all off the hardwoods disrobe themselves from all the masking (all from one side). The batch after that was mostly acrylic and one or two sheets of ply and hardwoods. And those are okay.
Even after you get it flat or not- storage is key. Everything I use on the big CNC I have to leave it in the garage a couple days to let it stabilize before I can use it. Or else it bends up like a taco afterwards. (not saying this is the case. Just saying overall)
With all that said, The word ‘Beta’ is on all the sheets. YMMV for now I guess.
When they announced the prerelease capabilities, it was in the long description. I think it got passed over sometimes (by me!) and/or confused with the focus issues of the lid camera on the materials for placement of design.
Multipoint autofocus is still in the hopper, as I have read it.
I take that to mean they only do one depth measurement for focus so far. Multipoint autofocus should not be in the hopper as it is an advertised feature. @henryhbk seems to imply it is done but I suspect it is just that his pieces were still within the focus band. It isn’t a single point with a CO2 laser, more like a real hourglass, i.e. two cones joined by a small cylinder. We know it can cut 1/4" materials in one pass so it must be reasonably focused over 1/4".
I actually had not read your post when I typed the “don’t whine” comment. So was in no way directed at anything you have said. Posted in hopes of heading off hundreds of people that expect to lay organic material on a flat surface and for it to stay that way. Personally have never had that experience from any manufacturer, Glowforge, Inventables, and certainly not the residential lumber providers. But have never used material in an especially controlled environment.
Will multipoint run the head all over the piece first then cut, or does it scan while it’s cutting?
I’ve been cool. I’ve been calm. I’ve not tried to get too excited. But now I am so stoked to get my GF! It’s really coming together! Thanks Dan and team!
We designed for a large margin of error. When we get multipoint autofocus, we’ll be able to run the head faster as we can reduce the MoE.
We also have a lot of secondary things that help: high quality optics reduce scatter and improve spot size, beam quality, the single-point measurement is deadly accurate (within 0.1mm), etc. Allows a few things to vary and still let you be successful.
Material thickness does two things. Primarily, it provides the dewarp specifications for the lid image allowing more accurate placement. The second thing it does is populate the focal height field for each operation.
However. The scanning process when you hit print is measuring the material height to set autofocus. It will use the measured autofocus height unless you have changed the focal height in the job operation manually, in which it will use that value.
That material height setting auto-populates the focal height setting for each job operation on the left with the same value you entered into the material height box of the uncertified material box.
At this point, the possibilities fork:
A. If you leave the focal height in the job alone (unmodified), the actual laser focus will be set by the scanning/red dot measurement. So if you entered a material height of .240” but the material was actually .300”, and you left the focal height in the job operation at the auto populated value of .240”, the scanning measurement will override this and focus the laser at .300” (or the closest available figure to that value)
B: you change the value in the focal height box under the job operation in the thumbnail. The red dot measurement will be overridden by your manually entered focal height.
I assume the logic behind this is that if you enter the material height and leave the focal height alone, it’s assumed that you want to focus on the material surface. And the scanning process (and subsequent autofocus) basically saves you from making a mistake in measuring your material. Or maybe you guessed. Whatever.
And the further assumption is that if you manually changed the focal height, you did so with a specific intent to focus above or below the surface of the material, so those wishes are honored.
I’m ok with the assumptions because I measure my material and if I focus somewhere else, it’s by intent.
What can be a little frustrating and could be confusing is that the focus only changes by steps. So if you had .240” material and put .230” into the box - the actual focus would be the same. I’m not so worried that the focus is the same but if you’re trying to focus below the surface, you have to find where that next step in focus change occurs.
It appears that the current possible focus heights are:
0.000, 0.028, 0.056, 0.083, 0.111, 0.139, 0.167, 0.195, 0.222, 0.250, 0.278, 0.306, 0.334, 0.361, 0.389, 0.417.
I believe it does round to the nearer value, but I can’t say with certainty. @palmercr did a bunch of testing on this, and can probably give a more definitive answer.