That accurate height measurement is absolutely critical. Without it, an algorithm in the program
adjusts the view of the screen incorrectly, which means that you will place the design incorrectly as a result.
Far right side is always going to look the worst after a print, because of the fisheye effect of the lid camera…if you want to see how it looks adjusted, click with the Set Focus tool right on top of one of those prints…that adjusts the view for what you saw when you placed the design initially.
When a print finishes, the view on the screen immediately resets to the un-adjusted view, which frequently makes it look much worse on the screen than what actually happened. But it needs that correct height, or the placement will be wrong.
This is what the view from the camera looks like…there’s no way on this earth that a human can eyeball that and get correct placement. The algorithm changes the screen distortion based on that height measurement, and it has to be accurate or we can place the design in the wrong spot.
Not to say there might not be something else going on too, so be sure to run through the troubleshooting steps that @Ray.V asked for…
And this might be hard to get your head wrapped around, but it helped me…when a Print finishes, the thing that looks out of place is the colored designs on the screen, not where it printed on the material, if you did things correctly with the Set Focus tool. You always use the Set Focus tool where you want to place the design, over each design, not in the center of the board.
Most of the time if I set focus it “auto focuses” before printing anyway. I’ve been using set focus on each print seeing that in a lot of the support suggestions in the forum in general. The gloves are the latest example but I’ve had others with proof grade material on the crumb tray. Right before Christmas it happened on a proofgrade cherry puzzle.
I went ahead and did a deep clean and followed the advice outlined by Ray.V that’s what the “gift of good” prints were about. The machine is level in all directions. Nothing was in the grooves under the crumb tray or anything. Things at the extreme left seem fine. I’ve gone so far as to map it out on the masking tape before printing and its on point more or less. Using the right side of the machine seems to almost promise alignment issues.
Hello @genesisart thanks for running those test prints. Since your prints on the right side are landing more than ¼” away from where they were positioned in the preview, I recommend recalibrating the camera in your Glowforge to fix it.
You’ll need a 12” x 20” piece of Proofgrade material with no markings or stickers. The feature was designed to be used with a flat piece of medium Proofgrade Draftboard, used upside-down (with the QR code side down). It may work with other materials that are the same size and use the same print settings as well, like Proofgrade plywood.
It prints a grid of markings, takes a picture, then measures its height in multiple locations. This data is used to make your camera more accurate for future prints.
Should you finish all of these steps, and find that you have an alignment error of more than 1/4", please measure the accuracy of the camera and send us a screenshot of the results.
The test with the Gift of Good Measure shows that your Glowforge is performing within the range of accuracy that we expect right now. As we make improvements to the software, I expect you to see further improvements to your alignment.
I will go ahead and close this thread for now but if you need anything else feel free to open another post or send us an email and we will be happy to continue to troubleshoot!
