Great work!
Bookmarked! You, sir, simply rock. and roll. Huge Thanks! 
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This is fantastic. We are all going to need/want this as a reference. Thank you for sharing your very fine work.
Maybe an idea for @dan and team: since all the OCD folks (Y’know: 87% of us) will be spending the first month of our ownership doing this kind of exercise to build our own reference catalog, maybe you could make pre-burned grids on Proofgrade material available. Like one set price for a stack of the most common pieces burned with grids, or even a free grid-burn sample with big enough orders.
And since the Very OCD folks (Y’know: 84% of us) will have a nagging feeling that their Glowforge is special and therefore tests by anyone else are suspect, maybe your code magicians could provide a software feature that will just do a full grid burn.
I myself would send a pizza to the code team for this. 
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Yes indeed, it can be linked in the Matrix (don’t have to recopy), and I started to do it yesterday and then got distracted by the fun and frolic 
on another thread.
Thanks for the reminder - I’ll do it now. 
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It is a shame there isn’t a correspondence between raster engrave greyscale values and cut and score power levels. Otherwise it would be easy to all the tests with one big raster.
Also it would be great if some special colour were reserved to give default power settings. For example grey vectors could set the power and all other colours behave as thy do now, just identifiers.
Would be great, but thinking the part where he said the template took 6-1/2 hours to run means we aren’t going to get a pre-burned sample. Even the last single row took more than an hour. Don’t want the shipments to get any slower.
Thanks for all the grunt work, Very handy!
Oh, agreed. I wasn’t even thinking it would be a pre-burn sample from each individual GF that is shipped, more of a generic one they could have a bank of them churning out in the factory, to be included with ProofGrade shipments, or separately ordered as a separate product. I’d personally shell out a few bucks for an (accurate) guide piece along with a stack of ProofGrade.
But yea, no, not something that would delay shipments any longer!! 
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@jamesdhatch, does it make much difference how large each rectangle is? Can I resize this to 1/8 x 1/8 sized squares and get a good idea of the color and depth? Or do you need a large enough area to REALLY get a good idea of what the settings will do?
I’d like to use as little space as possible and speed it up if I can.
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probably fine for getting a stab at coloration but i’m skeptical you’d have a clear idea of something like depth at such a small scale.
That one sort of surprised me - yeah, it’s a 5IPM, but it’s also only a few blocks that are less than 1 sq inch. I knew it would be long (because of the speed) but an hour & half really seemed over the top.
I made this fairly small (3/4") which gives a nice little piece of engraving. Much smaller and I think it might get too small - especially if you decided to play with LPI as well. This was my compromise.
I’m also not sure how much time you’d save because you’d have even more time being spent by the head starting & stopping. It’s not like a normal engrave where you’re doing a single large area. Each box is a series of starts/engrave/stop/repeat and the ends of the lines where it stops, moves the Y and then restarts is a fair amount of the time it takes to engrave as you get smaller & smaller.
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What size would you suggest would be “just big enough”? It looks like the original was about .75 x 1 inch rectangles.
oh! so it doesn’t go across each box and just increase the power as it passes over each box? It does each box individually?
Yes. I’ve not seen a laser that was able to span multiple objects with varying power in an engrave. That would be a very cool feature thought and the GF power supply ought to support it.
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Yeah, I thought it was already there (or will be) with the 3D engraving ability. Or the Variable power engrave.
If there is a section that goes through the white to black gradient, doesn’t the beam just increase power through the engrave?
I would think that this is a MUCH easier version of that.
That’s what the 3D engrave is supposed to do. Haven’t seen it in the wild yet.
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The diamond knurl tile that @mpipes shared in free laser designs exhibits a high level of dynamic power control.
It amazes me to see the power ramp up as the laser digs to the bottom and ramp down as it climbs to the peak. The engrave results in strings of 4 sided pyramids.
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I would like to run a grid like this on thick PG Draftboard but the link doesn’t work. Is there another link someplace?
This made so much sense and answered a number of questions I had running around in my mind as I wait for my GF.
Thanks for doing this.
Why is it when I upload this .svg it appears as one solid image? Each box can not be individually selected. How do you set the speed/power for each box if you can not select them individually?
Ahhh…figured it out. When I opened the file in Inkscape, all the boxes were black. I didn’t realize I had to change the color of each box to something different.
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