I am using the Glowforge to engrave bamboo cutting boards. It has worked on the first 30 boards until yesterday. On yesterday, the engraved designed started being off center. On the screen it shows as centered when looking at what is going to be engraved, but once it starts cutting, it is off-center on the board. When it is finished, you see the purple color of what was supposed to be engraved offset and what was actually engraved behind and off center. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Lots of reasons. The head might have been bumped which would ruin the calibration. How far off and is the same error shown after a restart and new calibration? 1/4" off is normal at this time.
Maybe post a picture so we can see how far off it has moved.
Have you been using a jig to place the cutting boards in the same place every time, or have you just been placing them randomly in your bed? Is it the same design and size of board, or do they vary? Like, do you use the same files from your dashboard or are you uploading new ones with each new project? If you’re eyeballing it every time without a jig, then it’s possible that your placement isn’t consistent.
With as many as you’ve done, for you to just notice the difference could mean the hardware may be miscalibrating, which I’ve heard that there will eventually be drift in all of our machines, but it shouldn’t be happening this quickly by much. If you aren’t aware, the further from center you go, the more you’ll notice the variation between your placed image and the engrave/cut, whereas the center is typically the closest to being “accurate”.
Thanks y’all for trying to help out. This is what it is doing. As you can see from the picture, the purple is where it should have engraved. But you will see how off center it is with the actual engraved part behind. It is on a stable surface and I shut down the computer and the Glowforge and left it off all day yesterday. Please help!
If the camera was working perfectly for you before, you were fortunate. It is not dead-on for most people. If your luck has run out, best practice is to use a jig or some other means of nailing placement without relying on the camera.
In your case, you could put paper down, score an outline of your object on the paper, then place the object in that outline and run the engrave with the score turned off.
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Do you have your material height correctly entered? If you forget that step, your alignment can be 'way off. (Current specs are that it will be within 1/4" of the image preview.)
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I see you already emailed us about this and we’re working on it there, so I’m going to close this topic.