I’d love to see this feature added for engraves. It makes a lot of sense to have it self clean as it moves down instead of dirtying up what was just engraved.
There are a lot of pieces that I’ve done that would have come out much better if not for the direction of the engrave. Some engraves I’ve done I’m not able to clean or it will damage the engrave, so I have to leave the residue there…
So I’m not sure if you’re describing the same motion. On the Glowforge the air is pushed back-to-front from the head area, then the exhaust sucks it out the back. So it kinda shoots the smoke to the front makes a u-turn to the left, and exits. Since the engrave is front-to-back, the smoke always passes across your fresh engrave.
Thats similar to what it does on mine…on Monday I’ll do 2 vids…one etching front to back and the other back to front…
Generally the back to front is not as clean…
I think the reason it does it bottom up is that you can see the engraving emerge. If it was top down it would be mainly covered by the head and gantry until the end. So I think it was done to make videos look more impressive.
So it might need to be an option as it seems to be on other machines. A bit more work to add a tick box in the GUI, but still trivial in the GUI frameworks I have used.
Hmm, yes that could be a reason.I think there is metal between the cables and the fire though. The main things that seem to be exposed are the lenses and the head cam.
I agree with most of what you said, except this part. We don’t know enough about their codebase to make any sort of judgement about how trivial or not any change would be to implement. Nor do we know anything about their software qualification or release processes.
I think your choice of language here is part of why people get riled up. Your choice of phrasing takes what is a straightforward and pretty uncontroversial observation that reversing the direction of engraving of raster images is likely to reduce the smoke contamination, and layers a value judgement about how long it should take Glowforge to implement it. Riding along with that judgement is what could easily be perceived as an implication that they’re somehow neglecting us if they don’t prioritize such a trivial change – after all it should only take a few minutes.
For the record, I don’t think that’s what you meant by your statement and I believe that you’re genuinely trying to provide context from your experience. And it’s interesting context for me! I have spent 20+ years building software but I don’t have any experience in image processing so I enjoy reading your insights. I also don’t think that you were intentionally trying to cast any aspersions on the Glowforge team’s efforts to improve the system. Still, I have to go out of my way to remind myself of my belief that you’re just trying to provide helpful context when I read language like that in order to read it in the best possible light rather than assuming that it’s a passive aggressive attack.
Thanks for your contributions to the forum, I really do appreciate them. I hope you’ll read this in the spirit of constructive feedback that I intend!
In doing those cedar coasters, there were some smoldering going on on already engraved parts until the air assist hit it a second time (although that stuff is akin to engraving gasoline)
Yes but when the head returns back the same X coordinate it will make no difference if Y has advanced a minute fraction or retreated a minute fraction. To move any appreciable distance X has made many passes. If it hasn’t cooled by then it is probably on fire for good anyway.