It isn’t an arbitrary fact and figure. It is in the specification page that people buy against:
Autofocus
Completely Internal — Lens moves internally up and down inside the head to focus on materials up to 0.5” (13mm) thick
So now that production units are shipping I am curious why the software has a 11mm limit.
One would normally expect a product’s software to be finished when it ships but this is far from it and Dan said it would be changing for a long time to come. That doesn’t mean there can’t be a manual that changes alongside it. As long as the web page links to the current version what it the problem?
If it no mapping is published I will measure it and publish it myself. Crazy to buy an expensive machine tool and not know what one of its primary controls actually does.
Oh, so they did specify it as 13mm. (If they’d just said 1/2”, that could easily just be 10mm rounded to the nearest common US measurement.) hmmm. Good question. Of course it’s possible that the 10mm figure is just them rounding it the other way. I hate measurements that don’t have precision specified. How many significant digits is that? Who knows.
Thanks Dan – most of my designs involve a lot of full-depth cuts, and only cuts, in 1/4", so the Full Power setting is definitely going to come in handy!
to me, if you say 0.5", you mean 0.5". not rounded up. if you say 10mm, you mean 10mm, not rounded down. this is a precise machine, 3mm is not precise.
In 2017? Sadly, no. I wouldn’t. Nothing ships with finished software these days. Just try asking Samsung when the Galaxy S8’s Bixby voice assistant will support any language other than Korean. (Ok, so they’re about to release a preview version for English to a small group of customers, but who knows when they’ll release it to everyone, or in any other languages.)
A lot of the strange fractions of inches I find in this forum come out as exact metric units when I convert them. The belts appear to be metric and some PG material thickness are metric.
My take on the two distinct range of powers is that it might be a power-supply-equivalent of the front two gears on my old 10-speed. One gear for speeds 1-5, for more delicate control of power to the back wheel, and the other gear for blasting down the street.
OMGoodness the precision power is exactly, precisely, incredibly what I need this thing to do! I am going to be cutting a lot of paper for my playing card projects and I NEED THIS so those samples are incredibly exciting.
I share your concern about sending the machine back for calibration when getting a new laser tube. However, I’m not sure that this information from Dan allows us to assume that we don’t have to do that. He’s just saying that the laser tube is calibrated outside of the machine. I don’t know much about laser tubes, but I don’t think there are knobs or dials one can change in order to make all tubes act the same…one might a look-up table from the calibration procedure to be uploaded to the specific machine the tube gets installed into (this look-up table is what I assumed Dan was saying was worth $25k, but now I think he actually meant a physical table filled with equipment and sensors that is used to calibrate the laser tube).
With this all said, I don’t see why the laser tube couldn’t be calibrated at the factory, mailed to the user, and in the mean-time, that calibration look-up table is being uploaded/downloaded onto your Glowforge so it’s there ready once you receive and install the laser tube. In this way, the user doesn’t have to punch in numbers to fill out a look-up table and Glowforge can keep their calibration information more secretive.
@dan, is this more accurate of what the situation may look like?
