Me too. I guarantee it’ll be off the farther from center. But I expect it to be… reasonable. I’ll shove some cardboard in maybe Sunday and do a quick run. I’m not worried about it, but I probably should have a clear working knowledge of how the entire bed works out.
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Very, very true.
Glad we got you taken care of!
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My CNC vinyl cutter does not have a camera, but you can tell the software about the shape and location of the work piece anyway. The software will print out a copy of the project with with special registration marks. You put the print in the machine, drive the head around with direction buttons, and zap the marks with a visible laser pointer. Now the machine knows where everything is. (Of course you need to line up the work piece with the proxy, and your printer needs to print at actual size.)
Does the GF have a visible laser pointer? I can imagine a similar procedure for our needs.
I would rather have the camera work automagically, but people are already doing things like doing a quick score operation to mark the actual target area. If we end up needing to do some extra steps for good targeting, those extra steps, whatever they are, should be fully baked into the official workflow.
Anyway, glad to see Tom’s machine is working better.
I’m having trouble with alignment now. When I first got the machine, it cut everything dead on, and now it seems everything is running about .25" off to the left no matter where I place my patterns on the work area. I’m currently placing my patterns .25" to the right to compensate, but working with leather scraps I am often trying to use every last bit.
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Have you turned the power on & off recently? If you leave it powered for long periods (I used to keep it on for days) its alignment drifts.
If you repower it regularly that’s not the problem 
️
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If it drifts that implies the stepper motors are getting out of sync. I wonder if it is related to the ticking sounds at the end of a build: Clicking/tapping sound after fan shuts off. Are the motors moving slightly?
First of all, @jamesdhatch is right about power-cycling. It must be done periodically (for some reason) to “reset” the accuracy.
Next, they tell us that being off by up to .25" is within spec at this time. (Personally, I think that’s horrible and impossible to work with, but it is what it is.) However, that should be at the extremes of the bed. Directly under the camera should be particularly accurate.
Also, be sure you’ve cleaned everything as instructed. Can make a huge difference.
And, they appear to make changes to both software and firmware without warning. They may have pushed something out to everybody, a group, or your machine specifically. Obviously if they did that it was with the intention of correcting something. But, unfortunately, that simply won’t always have the desired results.
All of that said, if your unit isn’t functioning as expected, you should definitely open a thread in Problems and Support ASAP so somebody can take a look.
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Stepper motors can get very hot if they are engaged but not moving for long periods of time. I have to wonder if there is protection built in to the machine to prevent them from getting too hot, or if they are going in to thermal shutdown at some point causing them to lose position.
They don’t get significantly hotter than when they are moving as they are usually driven with constant current drivers. Since they can be moving for many hours one would assume the current is set so they don’t get too hot.
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Heh. They could do any number of things to let us know what’s happening. A simple e-mail “We’ll be performing maintenance on 06-OCT-2017 at 20:00 EDT. We expect it to last for about an hour. During that time your performance and/or accuracy may be impacted. Please plan accordingly.”
I just wish they’d do something to let us know. And, hey… if it’s not the best method, try a different one. The important part is making the effort at this point.
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We use the Latest Updates section to let people know when there are changes.
Mmmm… To be more precise, you use the section after you’ve made changes. There’s no warning and no indication that a change is happening. I don’t know how often you’ve pushed FW updates, if at all. But that doesn’t take 0 seconds. But I assure you I wouldn’t run a job if I knew you were about to push something.
Well, wait… Maybe I’m assuming it’d matter. If you push a SW or FW update, would it break a job-in-progress? If not, then I suppose I don’t much care beforehand. But, otherwise…
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Based on everyone’s feedback, we post before the changes go live.
Updates do not interfere with an ongoing session. Usually a reboot or refresh is required to get it.
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That’s great to know. Matter of fact, that should probably be a sticky.
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there’s always a lot of speculation around that point when more than 1 person has a similar issue cutting around the same time. And that leads to people being upset that they weren’t warned about a theoretical update.
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It would be nice to have the button color change to indicate “Update pending, please reboot” maybe with a pulse fade on the button.
It should also be reflected in the UI.
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Yesterday between runs the machine re-calibrated. First time I had seen that.
I’ve seen that a few times. No idea what triggers it. But I think it’s relatively routine.
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Is there an RSS or some other way we can set up an asynchronous notification of changes?
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I’ve seen that happen several times since I got mine in July, the most recent was when they released the new bitmap engraving features in the UI. Kinda nifty when you’re in the middle of setting up the next job, the machine starts calibrating out of the blue and after refreshing you got new settings to play with. 
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When it does that to me, it feels very much like the firmware crashed and rebooted.