Fact is…we don’t know the answer to that specific question. But we do know that Dan isn’t going to answer it. He will politely say that he doesn’t have that information.
After three or so years of hanging around the forum and working with Glowforge, we know that their policy is to not answer questions like that one, because too many people then take them as promises. And then if they can’t subsequently deliver on it, they get reamed for months. So they don’t do it.
So, your question will not be answered. It does not mean they won’t eventually fix it up to work with vectors…it just means they are not going to tell us about it in advance.
Thanks for your down to earth reply! I understand they don’t give exact dates, but since this is an active roll out I was “hoping” I would get a answer. Heck I still haven’t received the update for raster images.
I should have directed my question to GlowForge workers. Anyways thanks for the responses everyone It’s been a fun exchange of words.
Not sure where this information is coming from (and I don’t mean just you, many people seem to think the same). Dan said “engraving” and that applies to both raster and vector engraves. I’ve verified that to be the case. Running at 4000 doesn’t make a job 4x faster, however, because the head needs to accelerate/decelerate at each side of a pass. Also keep in mind the increased speed is only useful on material that only needed low power before. If you were already at high power, there’s little benefit to increasing the speed.
It states “Note that this beta feature is only available when you’re engraving a bitmap image, like a JPG or PNG, and not when you’re engraving a vector image.” But this probably only applies to Minimize Margin
I didn’t realize that the speed wouldn’t be increased if you’re already engraving at max speed. I was thinking they increased the speed of max speed
I’ve done this, but only for one file about eight inches square. Total time was about two minutes less for a ~35 minute job, but I didn’t go all the way to 4000, more like 2000. To take full advantage you need to maximize the horizontal size of your engrave. For narrower engraves some people have reported the total time has increased.
At 4000 speed, it appears the printable width without using the new “minimize margin” feature is 7,165"(just over 7 1/8"), or 182mm. At 3000 speed: 11.57" / 294mm, @2000: 15.28" / 388mm, @1000: 18.1" / 459.5mm
I ran test prints and the aprox. time per pass is 0.9, 1.06, 1.72, 3.5 seconds; divided by distance gives us 202, 277, 226, 131 mm/s respectively.
So the sweet spot appears to be a little over 2000, but of course, ymmv, and you’d need to be working with material that was previously at less than 50% power at 1000 speed.
I just loaded the same vector square twice and the engraving settings shows up with the 1400 (basic) setting. I can’t run the test, but I would guess that if the setting shows, you can use it.
The article states the faster speed works with all engravings.
“Faster top speed
The top speed of the Glowforge Basic is now 1.4x, the Plus is 2.8x, and the Pro is a whopping 4.2x as fast as before. This beta feature is available in manual settings for all engravings.”
So as software engineer that frequently works on greenfield projects / large features. I will let you know that the current trend in the field to never estimate anything over a week. So while someone may have an gut feel for how long it will take to do the rollout, there is also 5 - infinite multiplier that will be applied. The reason they don’t give dates it because estimation is hard and customers are very unforgiving when a promise is made and missed.
edit:
From the outside it does look like they could use a skilled DevOps engineer to make releases less painful.
There are also things they could do to keep us informed, like say hey we are 10% rolled-out and uncovered a bug that causes alignment issues on the y-axis, so we are slowing down the release.
Not necessarily. “50” on the power scale isn’t 1/2 of “100”. It’s not a % scale. You could go from 50 power 1000 speed and get the same results at 3000 speed with 80 power. (I’m too lazy to do the math but neither the power nor speed scales are linear as your mm/s translations demonstrate so clearly. Even though you go from 1000 to 4000 for a fourfold increase, whereas in units/s measurements you only get a tad more than 2X true unit speed differences.)
Why on earth do you have HUGE projects on hold… for eight days… when it’s “six 1 hour cuts”? Perhaps instead of placing everything on hold for over a week; spend six hours and get them done instead of hoping you save a few minutes off your total time.
because there are other projects that can be done in the mean time. Effective use of time not withstanding I would love to have what is / has been promised … i’d LOVE to see what this thing can really do ya know?
It’s been a fun exchange of words.