Last night I did a quick experiment that I pondered about early on after the purchase. It seemed like the Glowforge would be able to act like a scroll saw sort of, and trace seemed interesting gimic without use.
At a garage sale I saw an old book of scroll saw patterns. It hit me (and a confused wife as to what the heck I was talking about), that I could use “trace” on one of the image patterns in the book, then put a piece of something in the machine.
I put in and tried the trace for the first. The scan was great, and the ability to exclude extra lines came in handy as things are a big tight on the pages. It also grabbed the appropriate lines for engrave.
I didn’t want to waste material on an experiment, and also wanted to try the precision settings on a cue card. Ended up with this:
Impressions:
-trace works great on these very well defined black on white lines
-interface on the exclusion page I found a bit confusing , maybe next I should do a tutorial first…
-1000/1 setting on cue card for engrave did nothing I had to go to 1000/5 to even get the light engrave
-cut had to go to 500/10 to finally cut. Took a bunch of attempts of bumping up till it finally went through.
trace needs some development. I cannot rotate a trace , and I would like to maybe treat the engrave as a score or cut
-also ability to export for further processing in another program would be nice.
Either way excited to be able to do quick ornaments for a Christmas show coming up. I may photo copy the images I want so I can rotate them as opposed to rotating the piece. Also I could not rotate the book as it can only fit one way in the machine.
Great idea! Coloring books would be a great resource for the scan function
I had really intended to explore and use the trace extensively, but my real weakness was/is in design software which is very powerful, and the need to focus on it was obvious.
So there is no way to rotate traces, right? I couldn’t find how to do that tonight while setting things up. I could rotate the plaque artwork, but not the trace.
You can only rotate vectors, not bitmaps. It appears that GF don’t know how to rotate a bitmap, so no surprise they find camera alignment so difficult.
Yes because this is getting ridiculous. Still no sign of delivery after two years. Virtually nothing in the software works properly. Things that are trivial like kerf compensation and bitmap rotation still not done. No sign of the hard things being done at all.
Best as I can tell no. It is fustrating as I am scanning a lot of items out of books, and if the book is crooked, well the cut is too. Thankfully the camera shows me where it is going, and I can cock my piece. But I feel that isn’t how things should be. I’m sure we will see some improvements to it, though I would also be happy if I could export it, as the line selection for what to keep isn’t great. Sometimes if the camera isn’t scanning right, or the page is slightly curved, you get double lines, or open lines.
Then apparently we have different values because I sure don’t see where being upset about something gives a person the right to insult others. I’d maybe expect that out of a 20-year old, not a retiree-aged man.
As to “virtually nothing in the software works properly”… my Glowforge is paying for itself and I knock projects out on it almost every single day. That’d be tough to do if “virtually nothing in the software works properly.” Have they delivered on all of their deliverables? Nope. But to say “virtually nothing in the software works properly” is an outright lie.
You’ve been practically begging for a delivery date and now you have a commitment to have one provided. Go enjoy your vacation. Enjoy something. Because I’ll be amazed if you enjoy your Glowforge at all when you receive it. I’m sure that they hope you do, but I can already hear the, “oh, I could have done this so much better.”
Have to agree. I have only had my GF for a short while, but it works beautifully and I couldn’t be happier. The only project that failed was one where my misunderstanding of a part of Adobe Illustrator occurred – Ildanach GF did exactly a it should, it was jut the file I sent to it was the problem.
Major features of the software have not been released. The software has been working great.
This may be as close to it just works as I’ve ever experienced. That is the hardest thing of all.
My problems have been with OpenSCAD and Inkscape not working as expected. As they’re open source I’m not upset, just temporarily exasperated. Ideally the features I’m waiting for will be implemented by the time I’m ready to use them (early next year if I can keep MY schedule of projects.)
