Easy! Just a gray gradient along an edge. Adjust power so the max depth corresponds to the material thickness.
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I wouldn’t know what power to adjust it to. They do everything for us here. We press a button and “magic” happens.
I now understand why @dan keeps using the term. ROFL!
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That’s not really a thing yet. There’s no depth anything. You just put in a grayscale image and go. Whatever comes out comes out. Different materials ablate more quickly than others. A grayscale engrave on acrylic really does nothing on my machine. It stays flat and just basicallly marks the surface. On poplar, however, it takes out quite a bit of material.
It’ll take a lot of data collection to find out what settings produce what depths. I’ve started to put things together to accomplish this, but it’ll be a while lol
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But that’s in the center of the bed, isn’t it? Put it way out on the outer edge and try again. Or not. I was really directing that question to Philip, who seems to be the only one with a pre-release who understands exactly what I’m talking about.
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That’s the laser experience. Typically we (newbie laser owners) are not that good with manual hand tools and can’t bring out the artistry we see other people with infinite patience and skill with chisels and gouges can. So when we take a really nice intricate design picture and the laser actually makes it happen it’s one of those magical moments that just makes you hold your breath in awe.
The laser finally lets me make things like they look in my head. 
GF is opening that experience up for the world.
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It changes on an almost daily basis. I don’t have insight into why though. Some days it’s pretty close, some days it’s not. I would personally prefer to have the ability to place things with numeric positioning because optical/drag and drop is just not accurate enough.
I’ve gotten lucky and had pieces land with sub-mm accuracy to where I wanted them to. But if I started and engrave, closed the browser, then tried to do another one exactly on top of it, it’s basically impossible unless you hack the UI.
Scaling is another example. If you scale or even rotate something you will never get it back the same exact size or rotation. There is currently no size, position, or rotation information given to the user. So nothing is repeatable currently, unless you make all the settings in illustrator as to scaling/rotation etc. kinda undoes the whole align via camera part of the laser though
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Totally agree. But what about pass-through and two-sided cutting? How can those possibly work without super accurate alignment?
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Head camera is the only way they are going to be able to do that reliably from what I’ve seen. The fact that the camera they are using for placement on material is attached to the lid is just going to give too much variance to be reliable for those type of things IMO.
They may prove me wrong with some kind of other weird magic like comparing the grid of the bed to previous pictures taken to determine if the camera has shifted at all, or using the head camera to home to a specific spot and check the offset of that position with what the lid cam sees. Not sure what they have in store for handling the inconsistencies there, but anything with any sort of accuracy will have the head cam playing a big role.
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Amen.
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(You know, it’s kind of insulting that people think I don’t know what I’m doing sometimes…
)
Is this close enough for you? (Far left limits of the field, full and accurate cuts.)
How about this?
I can test things with this machine that Philip can’t with his, because of his tube.
And you guys need to be a little bit patient now. I’m going to test as much as I can, and will report the results once in a while so you can finally ease your minds, but it takes time to test it and take pictures and write it up.
For the record, I’m not taking requests. There are things that I need to test to give feedback to Glowforge, so they can get the machines out the door. That comes first.
If I come across anything that answers one of the bazillion questions that have come up here, I’ll post it here. (And I’ll post some procedures as I discover them, so the folks who want to put a few designs together can get started.)
I’m not even sure if this is what Glowforge wants me to be doing with this thing, but that’s what I’ll do until I hear differently from them I guess. I’ve got a couple of things going now. 
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Looks like there might be a lot of differences between our machines =P
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Just to note. It’s not just her time she would be volunteering. Every little test @Jules does with the Pre-Release is another bit of Proofgrade material that’s not available for projects she finds interesting. I’m sure she has a priority list of her own.
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NO! we don’t want that, OK, OK we will be good. You are doing a great job on the write-ups keep it up.
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A good job! 
Finding out stuff that works and doesn’t work and then letting us know what you found out,
so the rest of us will not have to do the same thing,
Thanks
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Ummm… You got that artwork from the lid camera???
There’s always cereal boxes…
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What artwork? The placement of the cuts? Yes, that was entirely done with the lid camera.
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It’s OK. Sorry I brought it up.
HUGS…you little softie.
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