GF would probably be willing to donate some more ProofGrade to the cause, though I agree that expecting Jules to run tests on request is beyond reasonable.
It’s great that we have at least a few pre-release users willing to extensively document what they are finding and the public ones are all doing an outstanding job from what I see.
I’m about to show you. Philip got one to test from that bad batch of tubes and his can’t do what this one is doing now from an alignment standpoint.
You’re all going to be very pleased, I think. 
(I sure am…steppin’ on squeeee all over the place here!) 
I’ve already performed some of the tests. The thing holding me up is the time it takes to write everything up and take pictures of everything.
Everyone just relax and enjoy the rest of the weekend. There will be more to come next week.
Regarding alignment accuracy, it has been shown that there is the ability to zoom in and nudge the design with keyboard arrows. The team (wish I knew who to worship for that!) did a great job developing the zoom feature so that at higher zoom levels, the smaller the nudge!
It would be powerful if the nudge feature could be employed depending on which handle is being manipulated - size or rotation in addition to placement.
Perhaps that is a feature we could look forward to with the eventual software updates @dan?
Back in high school we were hanging out with two sisters and suddenly out of nowhere a scream and one dives at the other. There was murder in the air. There were three of us boys. One went down fairly early in the fight with a knee to the crotch. My best friend tried to restrain his girlfriend and I had her little sister. We were large guys, they were small girls. Finally I look at him, he nods, we both let them go. We had done all we could. At least it would be a fair murder, whoever won. We fell on the floor exhausted and then…just giggling.
Freakin’ sisters.
Am I the only one who pictured two Nuns going at it? (Almost one of those “what’s black and white and red all over?” jokes - Two nuns fighting… lol )
Maybe my life has been sheltered…
Im glad they added this functionality, but ill have to correct you a little here. Nudge doesnt change with zoom level, and the it is rather coarse unless you change it yourself programatically. The bed is ~1920 units wide in the digital world. At 20 inches, thats 96 units per inch. the nudge (if I remember correctly) moves by 5 units at a time which is ~ 1/20 of an inch.
Ive found this to be too much, so I generally remap it to about .5 units, with another key set to about 10 units.If you hold down shift and hit an arrow key it will give you movement of 25 units, which is super coarse.
Hopefully when they get everything finalized theyll add in the ability to change the nudge amounts and other key bindings in the UI.
I stand corrected. 
Thank you! I would have sworn I saw that demonstrated. 
Edit - Think it was in an early video by @marmak3261 showing the user interface… still looking 
Current status is “unsupported and not recommended; if you want to experiment, go for it, but don’t expect it to work well”.
…so concluding that anything will or won’t work at this point is premature.
We generally don’t let folks use things that aren’t 100% baked because of the risk that people will draw the wrong conclusions, and/or that they will get upset if we decide to disable something that was previously available on an experimental basis. We’re bending the rule a bit with this one; we’ll see how it goes.
Indeed. As I mentioned before, we had a bad batch of tubes and decided to build & send units with them rather than wait for the new ones. Current machines going out have properly functioning tubes and are… better.
Bear in mind that we’ll obsolete it several times over the next few months, so don’t grow too attached to any data you collect. 
It is magnificent that you’re doing that! So everyone else knows - this is just Jules being thoughtful and inquisitive. We haven’t requested our prerelease users to do anything other than print, enjoy, and report problems and suggestions.
I’ve asked @Rita to send Proofgrade gift certificates to people who post cool projects with Proofgrade material, to make sure people don’t get penalized for sharing them.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about?
It can’t… I’m not sure I follow your point? Neither feature is complete right now.
What would you like to know?
In the hopper!
Oh I’m sure. I’m not banking on any data I collect to be solid in the future but it will be a good starting point. As long as a date is attached it can be filtered out if necessary. It’s more about making a good data collection method.
@Jules @takitus @dan and all… This has been an interesting and informative thread. Thanks for all the great info!
Can a pre-release user with a good tube theoretically reproduce the 1/2" engraving you showed or not?
Any plans to send users with bad tubes a new one to try out user tube replacement?
Is the Proofgrade shop open at this point, only to people with Glowforges, or not at all?
Of course they could, if they knew what they were doing.
I do not know enough to do one yet.
I will eventually though, so it’s damned exciting to see what it can do without any interaction from me at all.
But the ability is there…it’s engraving at different depths based on the shading. If it can do that through an eighth of an inch it can do it through a half an inch with multiple passes, depending on how the user sets it up with manual over-ride now.
(I guarantee whoever set up that engrave in the video knew what they were doing.)
But I must repeat, I am NOT that good yet, so I can’t demo it for anyone.
What I am trying to ask is was that done with the software pre-release uses have now, or was it done with work in progress software that isn’t released yet? At the time I am sure Dan said it was unreleased software.
It was probably done the same way we’re doing it now, kind of…
There’s no way they were using a dithered image to get that result. There are sections that are waaaayyyy too smooth to be from a dithered file. I can’t change the output right now, I’m stuck with dithered. So to recreate that image in it’s clarity is impossible, but it’s varied depth is definitely possible.
Thanks, that is what I thought but Dan was evasive as usual and Jules over optimistic as usual with:
@takitus in this thread mentioned that camera alignment is pretty good some days and some days not - do you think that can be fixed by release so that we can always rely on accurate camera alignment?
I’m also quite interested in the answer to this question:
@jules says she will be trying something along thos lines and that’s appreciated, but this seems like one of those times when an @dan answer is needed since only you know where things sit now and what is expected to be feasible by production release.
Let me be clear, just for the sake of clarity. It’s impossible for me, with what I have currently access to. All of my images are post processed before engraving.
If I was able to do straight grayscale engraves without the dithering it might be possible, even with the bad tube. Dan had mentioned updates incoming on the engraving stuff, so maybe an option to disable the dithering will be part of that =). I certainly hope so!
Ouch! That’s harsh! I’ll do my best not to distress you with my excitement over the machine in the future. 
So sorry for the inconvenience.