Beta Question

Hi. Just wondering about the beta feature. I put a cork coaster into the bed of my GF Pro and placed my picture on it. My coaster is about 4" in dia. This is all I had in the machine. I then noticed the speed of the engrave was showing 4000, so I hit the print button and the time showed to do the print was 20 minutes. If I had set it up without beta , say my speed was 1000, it would take 8 minutes, I hit the glow button to see what would happen, the laser head was doing a very large section of engrave, well passed the coaster size, why would this happen? Andy S.

In order to get up to and then slow down from the 4000 speed the head has to cover a wide area. The higher speeds are really good for wide horizontal engraves that already use most of the tray. You can always do some experiments to test this :slight_smile:

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So beta is good for large projects and not for 4" coasters? Andy S.

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Well that particular part of this rollout yes, but the clean corners part is good for everything

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There’s quite a bit of discussion and explanations for this in the discussion thread. Might be worth your time to browse through those.

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4000 is pretty extreme. If you want to engrave halfway through paper that would be a good speed. The slower it goes the less time getting up to speed and slowing down. For any design there is a sweet spot that the combination of speed and distance saves the most time, but power and LPI also enter the calculation so time is not always the best metric.

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Thanks for sharing this :slight_smile:

Based on the description of your print, as @deirdrebeth pointed out, in order to get up to and then slow down from the 4000 speed, a large area will need to be covered. This can also increase the time of the print, due to the time it takes to get up to full speed.

I also suggest reviewing the discussion thread @geek2nurse referenced, as it has some great tips regarding the new update, and how it can effect your prints.

I hope this information helps. I’ll close this thread for now, but if you run into any additional trouble, please feel free to reach out to us directly at support@glowforge.com. Thank you!

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