I dont think its cloud processed. I think its on the fly. Im just wondering how fast that lens can move and what type of response time it has.
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I saw that, and Ive had to deal with that on a few cuts of my own and was pleasantly surprised with the outcome! Im wondering if something has a pretty crazy topology, how well it would be able to keep up with it changing so rapidly. It would have to move that lens up and down really rapidly. Guess its something we can put on the testing docket =)
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Ditto
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Correct. When I tried to put a 4" circle design on a 4" cork coaster I was a hair off (or the camera was). So when I pulled the piece there was a ring around the artwork. Had I been cutting the whole thing, the circular cut would have taken care of that but because I was using a pre-cut coaster I told the GFUI to ignore the cut line. Unfortunately when I tried to enable the cut line and ignore the engrave the app errored on me and I couldn’t do it. So i have a little ring of cork showing on the edges. That’s okay for home, but it’s not okay if I were making these for sale.
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This is what I was assuming was the case from the beginning. The head camera being an optical edge finder could be exceptionally accurate.
edit…
OK, great. That has been part of the plan from the beginning. Maybe I didn’t assume it after-all. It seems like I just heard Dan say it and then remembered it.
Here’s a post that former user spike posted when I mentioned that I hoped the head camera would be used like an edge finder…
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Set your artboard to 20x12 and it will always snap to the same location when uploaded.
We believe delivering your machines, as promised, ASAP, is more important than anything else right now, and that’s where all of our development energy is focused.
I dig the jig-with-fiducial thing, though.
Eventually we’ll compensate for any drift in the lid camera - we have some tricks up our sleeve there that we haven’t talked about.
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Yes, please, I know there are a 1000 things that would be nice but at this point, feature drift could kill this project.
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It isn’t feature drift. Accurate positioning with the cameras has always been promised. Dan even mentions it in the Tested video above and phrases it as if it already works.
8 . Optical Alignment
The dual cameras align the laser head with the frame, with your design, and with your material. Glowforge realigns with every cut and engrave, adjusting timing and position, so every print comes out perfectly.
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Read the name of this thread.
Yes they need to continue to work on the optical, yes they need to give us an absolute system, no they don’t need to delay anything adding the absolute/cartesian system. It can come as ongoing software development. The theme of this thread is feature drift.
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If optical alignment worked then we wouldn’t need CNC style absolute positioning.
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I think its necessary regardless
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We seem to be going round in circles, but why? If it can locate the corners to sub kerf accuracy and translate the artwork to match then why do you need to push it against a jig and why do you need a fixed 0,0. It could be defined as the bottom left corner or your workpiece, where ever that lands.
I get that @Dan, and in fact have my AI set to always default to a 12x20 document, however, since the piece isn’t rigidly held in place, nor is the bed, it’s not absolute like it is on my 3D printer or CNC mill.
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Except if you’ve removed the material and put it back in between operations the material isn’t exact anymore. I ran into that problem trying to re-engrave my centering ruler when the tick marks didn’t engrave. There’s just enough play in the crumb tray to shift it a few hairs (that’s a technical measurement 
in this case thicker redheaded hairs, not the finer blonde hair 
).
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If the head camera will be able to do edge sensing, wouldn’t it be reasonably easy to detail, then, a corner of a jig as 0,0 for the purposes of batch processing? Designate the work space to be the size of the jig, and the upper left corner is always 0,0. That would give consistent results provided the jig is consistently oriented in the bed. It wouldn’t even have to be in the same spot of the bed each time, so long as ‘up’ was always up.
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That’s great but isn’t it a bit like flogging a dead horse - trying to solve the camera lense distortion problem when there are numerous solutions in industry for this issue? It should really be a non-subject for a laser cutter that serves anybody but craft users. We need to use GF for functional prototypes. Aiming and shooting doesn’t cut it (boom boom).
Don’t you have the ‘mini-me’ secondary laser on the head that already guages material thickness? Can that guy not also be used to find a known 0,0 point on the bed for calibration?
Then there’s the option of using the software to position the art relative to the home position, which should simply be visible on screen and, again, could probably be determined by the hardware in numerous ways.
We’re not asking you to drop everything and solve this now but lets at least recognize the importance of this issue.
We need an accurate machine.
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If I was a Glowforge investor and Dan said he wanted to shred the CNC/laser cutter market I would try to have him ousted from the company. Maybe that is their goal, but the payday is a 
in every suburban living room and 
in every big box store. I see woodworkers and machinists and the commercial/industrial market as a means of paying the bills until the real market can be developed. That doesn’t mean the two are mutually exclusive, but to me it would mean eventually in a machine with different features.
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I’m just getting to this thread now and I apologize for grabbing something so far back in the list.
Does the X axis rail go all the way to the front and back? Can you cut out an area for the X axis rail to run in and put “feet” to snug up against the Y axis rails in the front and back where it wouldn’t interfere with the X axis rail moving up and back?
I’m working on a rig that wraps around the ends of the rails and snugs into the corners. It’s a little tricky as there isn’t a lot of room to slip in there, but should definitely be possible. The goal is to make corners that are absolute positioned to the case, onto which you can place your jig of choice to make jig placement 100% repeatable. Unfortunately each corner is custom of course.
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