Discussion of (early!) July update

I didn’t take a video, but I did engrave on ordinary office paper, I just grabbed it from my printer. I can take a video tonight.

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Sorry if this has been discussed, but I was surprised to see a minimum operating temperature of 60F in the manual. I would have thought that cooler (but non-freezing) temps would be a positive for a device that requires active cooling. I don’t even live in cold place - western WA with GFHQ - but the garage where I plan to put the :glowforge: is below 60 for a large part of the year. I know it marks me as an outlier, but I routinely have my whole house below 60 in the winter. I’m not clear now if I am going to have to take steps to actively heat the room where the GF goes (while it cools itself…)?

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Not sure if my Pre-Release ever saw 60F until June. Was operating between 50-60F for most of the time. Sometimes I would turn on the auxiliary heat to bring it up to 50F. WV mountains in a below ground basement. Only the 2nd an 3rd floors get much heat from the woodstove.

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I’ve got the opposite problem. We were hoping to put the :glowforge: in the “art shed” workshop, but here in Las Vegas that shed is going to spend a chunk of the year over 120F. We only cool the house down to 77F.
@dan Will operating outside rated temperatures impact the warranty?

The Glowforge will not even operate at that temperature in the art shed, the software won’t allow it. Check the post I quoted below, another user’s swamp cooler went out and the temp in his house hit 93. The software shut him down.

Indoors at 77 it will be fine.

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I’m only speculating, but I would imagine this has to do with the potential for condensation to occur below a certain threshold and/or the expansion and contraction of the components over time.

Keep in mind also that your material changes properties with the temperature: if you mean to cut two pieces to dovetail together, the one you cut at 55F in the morning may not fit with the one you cut in the afternoon at 75F, depending on your tolerances.

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@dan is precision power a linear or log scale? is the scale 1-99 hardware limited or could it be finer? if so, will you reconsider giving more granular control via a larger scale?

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Or the calibration table is kept by GF online and used when calculating the power levels given its all in the Cloud.

Being new to lasers I have to ask… What material would benefit from having over 100 different power selections? I just can’t think of anything where one would perceive such small differences.

i think it’s less about why one material needs all of those settings and more that i’m sure there are materials that could probably stand to use an in-between setting to create whatever the operator originally had in mind.

i suspect that it’s not going to be a big deal in practical daily use, but i don’t want to take away someone else’s opinion, either.

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Well remember you are balancing speed and power since you sort of multiply them together. You might find one or the other is better for a given pattern (like the motion system can’t move at that speed around that curve set so you need to back off power to allow lower speed). With both being independent variables that are sort of related, you need more gradations.

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I think I get what you’re saying. I have no idea what’s typical in laser cutters, but doesn’t the Glowforge compensate when given conflicting orders like that? I mean, would it say “They asked me to go this speed and this power, but I can’t do that so I’ll compensate by lowering both speed and power to achieve the desired result.”

Well this is obviously only in manual mode, and we don’t quite know the magic that is performed (that’s the good/bad thing with magic) for compensating for things.

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Any material that you’re engraving fields of depth into.

Pretty much what this tells me is that if I want to consistently engrave using variable power, I should be scaling my greyscale depthmaps to 100 levels if I want to maintain the highest fidelity, or use up to 200-256 levels if I want a softer, mathematically averaged transition of power levels.

Edit: I’m talking about on the thickest of materials, not thin like paper, naturally… material where even “100” couldn’t cut through it.

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I definitely understand what you’re saying. And I don’t disagree in the on-paper, mathematical sense. I just don’t know (I’m not saying it’s not, I’m saying I don’t know) if it’s practical. Can one really perceive the difference between 50.0 power and 50.5 power when engraving a block of wood?

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you could potentially see it as stairstepping (equivalent of jaggies in a lower res JPG) in the depth. is it smoother or are there more ridges?

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I get the theory. But I honestly want to know if it’s visible to the average human, or if it is, what materials would you actually see that? In my recent testing in wood, I can’t see a difference between an entire degree side-by-side, let alone half a degree.

you would know better than i from actually having a machine to print, i’m just speculating. i suspect it may depend on the engraving itself and the angle of the depth change (does depth change over .5mm or 2mm laterally?). or maybe it’s more of a feel thing than a touch thing.

In every likelihood, no. :slight_smile: Wood is a poor example, though. You’d have as much luck striking a wooden match, holding it flat, and guessing exactly where the flame would stop. It depends on wind, the wood, waxes infused in the match… so many variables that it’s a pointless endeavor.

Harder and less organic materials would be better choices: Stone. Hard plastics. Higher temperature material that cools rapidly.

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And if you de-focus slightly to get a smoother result, it really washes out in the end.