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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really appreciate you looking into this, it sounds like something that I would be quite interested in once I get my own laser on my desk
But the axes are absolute with respect to the lid camera, not the case.
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Great topic.
Question, / idea for a possible work around:
Since the tray is not rigidly set, and we need a reliable way to position the work perfectly each time, then what if we could have the GF save our projects as a file, which we could then re-load each time we need to run a new batch?
By that, I mean save the exact project that we did, including the number of objects, the sizes and positioning, etc.
And as part of that, we could create a cross, or an x, or a “target” on both the material tray, as well as part of the vector, that will be “ignored”…and that will then allow us to perfectly re-position the file to where the new set of materials has been placed each time.
Right now the app allows you to choose to move the entire set of work together as one set, or to move any group that you can highlight in a square as one set, or to move any piece individually, so I think this would work pretty well.
Not perfect, and maybe a bit annoying to have to move the file around each time, but maybe not a bad compromise.
Ohhh, even better: What if we could print out a special design that the forge would recognize as 0,0, place it on a corner (or wherever) of the template trays, and then only have to save the file once; the forge could read that special design and then always work appropriately in the future based on us just saving the file one time?
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I understand. But since the camera is rigidly locked to the case and the case is rigidly locked to the case, they presumably have a fixed relationship to each other. So the bed which can essentially free float under the piece does not make a fixed location. But if you had truly fixed corners at each corner of the bed you could place your jig (e.g. sheet with cutouts) and hold it rigidly in place, then everything is locked.
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This is what I keep thinking, I know the machine itself is extremely accurate. But if it only “homes” with the lid cam I can’t see it ever being "within a kerf width"
If it homes with the head cam then possible.
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Hinges wear and tweak, or even a little debris in the hinge or any contact point could put you off more than a kerf.
But a jig you are talking about would still be useful just to get material square
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The camera is rigidly locked to the lid. Does the lid have pre-loaded bearings in the hinge? If it does then you could expect it to maintain an exact relationship but I have never come across hinges like that.
Hey, and dirt settles on rails, belts stretch and wear, etc. This is true on CNC mills and all laser cutters. But we can optimize within the application’s needs. My goal is to make it repeatable, not necessarily absolute overall.
In other words, today I want to make 30 runs of dog tags, I know that if I take the dog tag jig out, and put it back, and load dog tags, they will be in the exact same location as the last time I did it. I care less that if I specify 135.678,450.432 that it will be exactly the same location. It’s not that it isn’t important, but the first use case seems a more common problem (the jog and job items line up reliably)
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Totally agree! I’m just thinking out loud:-). We always used big industrial CNCs that could hold .0001" machining steel. When we got out first 4x8 router type CNC it could only hold about .005. The machinists that I had at the time couldn’t handle it even though we were cutting large plywood parts:-) they were always complaining.
Question:
When you bring in artwork, let’s say it 8"x8" does the GF software always stick it tight into a specific corner? Or centered? Or random??
Thanks for all your effort!
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You can reliable position an object in the workspace if your artboard is 20 by 12 inches. If your page size or artboard is set up smaller and you haven’t moved things down to the lower right, they tend to end up in the top left corner. I haven’t taken the time to figure out what is going on because once I found out about the 20 by 12 page size, I use that for my default design template.
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