Is there a way to change the direction the Glowforge prints?
I have built a few jigs to repeatedly print text on a variety of items, and I have the text oriented vertically on some and horizontally on others. The vertical text print takes considerably longer because the printhead always prints in strokes from left to right. If I could change this to vertical movement, it would speed up my printing on those items.
Before I build new templates to try to orient all my text horizontally, does anyone know a way to change the print direction?
Unfortunately, there is no way to do that. Glowforge uses their own algorithm to decide how to do the motion planning, and there are no options to influence it.
Not sure it would work that well mechanically, either. The print head itself is already unusually heavy for a laser machine (one of the reasons it moves so slowly), and there’s a lot of tuning that goes into how to make it move predictably and consistently, ramping up and down, etc. I would imagine doing that with the whole carriage is significantly harder.