Camera calibration "Expired" (multiple times)

I’m sorry to hear that you ran into trouble when trying to recalibrate your camera. I extracted the logs from your unit and took a close look at the calibration attempts.

On the first attempt, it looks like the pre-print image is a bit dark. Would you please let me know if you’ve had any issues with the LED light strips dimming or going out on the left and right of the inside of your unit?

On the other two attempts, it looks like you might have used a piece of material that already had the calibration pattern printed onto it. Each time you run the Camera Recalibrator, you’ll need a blank sheet of 12” x 20” Proofgrade material with no markings or stickers. The feature was designed to be used with a flat piece of medium Proofgrade Draftboard, used upside-down (with the QR code side down). It may work with other materials that are the same size and use the same print settings as well, like Proofgrade plywood.

If your LED strips appear to be consistently bright, would you please re-try calibration with a fresh sheet of medium Proofgrade Draftboard? If it doesn’t complete as expected, please let me know the time and date of the attempt and I’ll investigate.

Thank you!

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That was my last piece of draftboard, so now I am faced with paying for more materials to waste (and $9 shipping) to run the calibration. I guess I’ll just have to forgo the calibration, which is more than a little disappointing.

The calibration test ran just fine even with the previous score marks, until the part where it said it was acquiring a bed image at the end. The GF was scoring perfectly over the existing marks. Yes I know that’s not how the test was designed to run but it ran fine. The problem occurs when it is supposed to take the new bed image.

The LED strips dim slightly when you open the lid, but they are at full brightness while the lid is closed. Here’s an image of the bed from when I was doing some alignment checks of my own over a year ago:

No you don’t. Several people have reported using materials other than PG Draftboard (try Revolution ply from Home Depot). Or mask the DB you’ve already used.

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You can actually run the calibration on any light colored material that is perfectly flat, completely covers the grid on the tray, and that scores clean and dark. Any lightweight wood or heavy chipboard/mattboard will work.

A suggestion…if you leave that ruler overlay on the bed when you are trying to run the calibration, that might be what is causing it to fail. It needs to be clean plain material because the camera is going to search for only those printed marks. They need to all print completely, and with nothing else to confuse the issue. So make sure to take that out before you run the calibration.

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Just remask and reuse it.

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That ruler is only used for positioning small pieces (because the alignment is so far off). It’s just the outer edge from a 12x20 piece, so wouldn’t work with PG sheets anyway.

Good! Just checking. :wink:

What our other community members have said regarding calibration being possible with other materials is correct. Thank you folks!

For the best possible results we recommend using medium Proofgrade Draftboard as the process was designed using that material.

@eflyguy, I’m sorry to hear that you used your last piece of Medium Proofgrade Draftboard on a calibration attempt which didn’t complete as expected. If you’d like, I can send you a replacement sheet so you can run the calibration under ideal conditions.

Since I’ll need to get your shipping address for this, please reach out via support@glowforge.com and we’ll start the process of getting you the replacement material.

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I used chipboard, and ran the calibration tool again. Same result - and, again, immediately after the “expired” message came up, I was able to launch the regular app/UI (which was not running in another window/tab) and the bed image with the logo scores was present, so there’s no way the GF was offline as claimed in the “expired” message.

It takes three minutes from “taking a picture” to “expired”…

14:13:

14:16:

~10 seconds later:

By the way, optics (and lid camera) are clean. I cleaned them on Wednesday because I wanted a “fresh start” with having to re-learn a bunch of my settings, and also because the machine had not been used in many months.

Thank you for your patience while we look into this. I’ve let the team know and we’re currently investigating the issue further. We’ll let you know as soon as we have an update.

I’ve heard back from my teammates and they’ve requested some additional information. In order for us to learn more about your Wi-Fi connection, would you please run a speed test and let me know the results?

  • Using a laptop, sign on to your phone’s Wi-Fi hotspot and open app.glowforge.com

  • Open another tab in your browser. In this tab, navigate to speedtest.net

  • In the Glowforge tab, try to upload a large design.

  • While the design is uploading Switch to the speedtest tab

  • In the speedtest tab, press “Go,” then wait for the animation to stop

  • Send us the Download and Upload numbers displayed after the speedtest ran

If you’d prefer to share the information privately, please feel free to email the test results to support@glowforge.com

I assume the comment about phone wifi hotspot was a mistake/left in from some other conversation. I do not use my phone for a wifi hotspot. I have ATT fiber and use that wifi for everything in my home - including phone calls (wifi calling)…

Anyhow, while uploading a large design file, here are my broadband stats:

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Just remembered - whatever is happening with my GF is going to have no impact on my download/upload speeds on my laptop, because WiFi tops out around 500Mbps, but my fiber broadband connection is 1Gbps - I just don’t have a computer connected directly via Ethernet cable.

I do, however, have a USB-Gb ethernet adapter for my MacBook Pro, using that instead, I get:

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Pretty fast internet. I am soooo jealous. :stuck_out_tongue:

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@eflyguy, sorry about the mistake in my instructions. Thank you for catching that! It looks like you’re getting excellent connection speeds.

After looking into this in detail, it looks like there might be something causing a slow transfer when your Glowforge uploads data as part of its calibration process. This could potentially be caused by interference from other wireless devices on your network. One thing you could try would be to turn off your other devices and then see if calibration completes successfully.

Finally managed to run this with everything that connects to wifi, except for my laptop, powered off. Note that the laptop connects to 5GHz:
image

Same result - after ~3 minutes from “Taking a picture”, I got “Expired” again.

I fired up a site survey utility and scanned my home (the main living area shown is not very large - 38x28’) and the signal strength at the GF is shown below.

I managed to get calibration to run, you can close out this case.

For the benefit of those who might also struggle with this issue - it ended up being a weak wifi signal. My broadband provider might have great bandwidth, but the 2.4GHz radio on their equipment totally sucks. I realized the signal strength survey I had shared was for 5GHz, the laptops default. The 2.4GHz data was not so good. I bought a well-reviewed 2.4GHz range extender but that didn’t help either. Having that, however, allowed me to run the speedtest on my laptop over 2.4GHz, and the results were pathetic. It even gave an error during the upload test.

So I dug up a spare router and connected it directly to the ISP equipment via ethernet cable. Speedtest showed good transfer speeds both up and down, so I switched the GF over to that, and the calibration ran without issue.

Now that the calibration has run successfully, I can switch the GF back to my regular wifi, which has given me no issues - I don’t need an extra router and cable running thru my living room! lol.

Oh, and the calibration has, of course, made a significant difference in UI-bed alignment. I was previously out over an inch in the top right corner, and about 1/2 inch on the other three.

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Thank you for the update and for the information on what led to a solution. I’m glad to hear that your unit was able to complete the camera calibration! I’ll close this thread now.

If you run into trouble again, please post a new topic here on the forum or email us at support@glowforge.com and we’ll be happy to help.