Honestly, I don’t see the issue. I have posted a crap ton of engraves and no one has pointed out that there was too much residue on it. This is because I use a soft toothbrush to clean it up before I post it here.
For all the feature sets or functions to nitpick. This would not be my first choice.
shrug
But is there any rationale for the way it is?
Is is it more than a 10 min job to reverse it?
Probably about two lines of code to reverse the direction and reverse the image iterator.
all i was doing was explaining the issue the op had. it’s great that you don’t appear to have any need for it; i’m not being sarcastic, either, if you’re not limited, then cool.
but what on earth is with this forum and its complete inability to see that some people have a use for things that they don’t? and the answer isn’t necessarily that the glowforge is the wrong tool for the job.
personally, i’d just like to see staff comment on it, one way or the other, and the issue can be put to bed.
Where are you getting these estimates from?
And at any rate it’s a software issue. If @dan said they are going to add that function- Then they are going to add it.
Thanks for insight on this. A couple of things here. I think most people here would be too polite to say that. Also, there’s no way for anybody to know that a section of a design is pure white or not so they wouldn’t know the difference, necessarily, between smoke and an off-white color. Also, I tried brushing, but it didn’t do the job at all, at least not on this wood.
I spent 30 years leading software teams to write code, and writing it myself. Including things like raster graphic libraries, scanners, printers, etc. It wouldn’t take me long to reverse a loop.
Something tells me if you were lead software engineer at Glowforge, I’d have a very different machine.
I am fine with use cases. But their raster engrave direction by means of the motion planner had been a talking point for (wow…huh) years. There are many, many post and threads about it. It gets old. And frustrating.
I guess I am coming at this from the CNC, 3D Printer and CNC Plasma perspective. All of them needs some kind of finishing work at the end. This is no different.
for sure, but i think that despite talking about it for a long time, this is one of those instances where the problem simply doesn’t occur to someone until they run into it.
i’m 100% for finish work; i think a lot of people limit themselves by not doing any finish work on laser-produced goods. at the same time, there’s no reason not to ask.
haha, i dunno, maybe all you’d get is the same ui with a checkbox to reveal ‘advanced settings.’ i’ve definitely seen some cases of ‘well this was obviously designed by engineers,’ but there’s also no reason not to let people have information if they feel they’re capable. you just tell them that something isn’t supported for one reason or another.
I find typically the response to that to be:
But I paid my money so I don’t have to do better.
[My personal favorite is: I’m surrounded by people who can’t do what I do but know I’m doing it wrong.]
as far as cleaning, you might try dampening a paper towel in alcohol and wrapping the work in it and place it in or under plastic to let the solvent soften the deposit.
Until we get some folks chiming in with clear examples of an Epilogue cutting and engraving back to front and what post procession is needed, it’s hard to make a judgement. I do know that in cutting an object I have many designs that process from back to front and leave soot on the leading edge. But I almost always have masking. As to engraving, even going from back to front you will have soot deposited on the unengraved surfaces that you have to attend to. And I can’t imagine having to laser through the ash and smoke of natural rubber as you go down. I guess if the air assist blows the ash totally across and away, it would work. That would be an interesting test.
I can imagine that this is a feature that might have its uses. It’s good that it is in the hopper. From all that I have read on the forum and Glowforge staff discussing this, and @smcgathyfay’s input somewhere along the line with her experience, choosing to engrave bottom up was clearly intended, taking into consideration all these issues that we brought up.
I’ve thought about it many times and haven’t ever come up with a design where I said, this is exactly where back to front would make it easier. But then, I can’t think abstractly very well about vectors and motion and plot it in my mind.
Yeah. I’ll give that a try for sure. If I have time, I’ll do that tonight.
Believe me in my line of work EVERYONE knows how to do it best but weird they continue to hire me and the company I work for to keep doing it. I guess it’s like that in every job you have, someone always knows it better but weirdly hire you to do it lol
A funny response to a simple suggestion of how to make the GF better. If somebody comes up justification of why it is better the way they do it now then fair enough. If not why not change it and make it better?
It is starting to look like belief in GF as being the one true way is a religion. Anybody that suggests an aspect might be improved is a heretic to be slapped down.
I just can’t see how a simple suggestion of an improvement that is trivial to implement becomes a big controversy. Don’t we all want the GF to be the best machine possible?
I don’t think that if you offered a simple solution to make things better it would bother anyone. It’s when it’s a constant, non stop barrage of complaints and whining, that people start to get annoyed.
Why an Epilog… I have 2 perfectly good Universal Lasers… 
I cant say for the GF since I obviously dont have one in front of me.
But on my Universals, the airflow goes down through the air assist right with the laser beam then gets pulled towards the back of the bed.
When doing heavy etching, the smoke and debris get pulled back over the etched portion if cutting back to front (which is default).
For light etching it doesnt matter too much, but with deep etch on wood or rubber/silicone, that leaves alot of residue, its always cleaner to cut front to back and leave the newly etched portions clear of the shoot, smoke and debris…
Unfortunatly there will still always be some debris, but its much less when I cut front to back…
I just did make a simple suggestion of an improvement. Constructive criticism. People got upset.
I think the GF is a very good machine at this point, but it isn’t perfect. For example, I would much rather have it than an FS Muse, but the muse can do cuts and engraves without out over burning the corners. So GF have that to learn from it. I have even posted demo code to do it. If this was an open source project I would submit pull requests. But it isn’t so all I can do is make suggestions.
I just can’t understand the attitude where people can’t accept that there might be better ways to do some things. I can see that the machine is good enough for a lot of people but it doesn’t meet its own specifications on the front page yet. And here is what looks like a simple oversight that should be very easy to correct. Happy to be told it is deliberate for some reason I have overlooked, or very hard to change due to some bizarre software architecture but from where I am looking it is a trivial thing to change the direction of the Y axis and reverse the loop iterating over the image.
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…