Too many times, a print jobs stops, fails in the middle of a print. Now you are stuck restarting the whole print and wasting a bunch of time not knowing how it will recover. You end up throwing out valuable materials and there is no way to pick up a job where it failed.
Okay, I understand, Glowforge probably has no way of knowing what point your print job failed or where to start it from to recover right?
How about a slider component on the “Magic Time” screen that allows you to forward through the different steps of your project? The step before “Magic Time” is “Calculating Precision Movements”. To me, this indicates to me that by the time you get to “Magic Time”, Glowforge has some sort of print plan in memory that says what order to print your steps from any of the steps on the left (I don’t know what these are called.) and I would imagine it has a pretty good breakdown for all of those precision movements within each of those steps as well.
So, that being said, a slider switch that would allow the user to slide a slider component that represents 100% of the job would allow the user to forward back and forth through the “Precision Movement Plan” that is in memory and allow the user to start the print at a certain point that they can see updated on the screen as they slide the slider.
Example: I have two steps on the left. First Step cuts a square, Second step engraves a circle.
Scenario 1: The print fails in step 1 on third side of square being cut. User restarts the Print, same Precision Movement Plan gets calculated as no modifications have been made. “Magic Time” pops up and there is a slider that allow the user to forward through the plan until just after 2nd side of square has been printed. (Some sort of update on the screen signals the user where they are in the process so they know how far to move the slider). User is able to start the Print at a point that is somewhat close to where it failed.
Scenario 2: Print fails some point just past the halfway mark of engraving a circle in step 2. User restarts job. Precision Movement Plan gets calculated the same. “Magic Time”. User forwards the slider switch until update on screen signals they are about 50% of the way or more through 2nd step and engraving of the circle. User has to use their best judgement depending on how good a job the indicator on the screen is letting them know what point they are in the engrave on the print plan. They start the print at a point just before the point they feel the Precision Movement Plan should start.
Run this by your developers. One of them will be creative enough to take what I’ve said and implement. Then pay them a hefty amount for saving all your users lots of time and money and having rave reviews of GlowForge and increasing sales!
Not sure if this is feasible or not, but suggestions for improvements need to go into the Problems and Support section so that someone from Support eventually sees it and they can log it into the customer requests. (I’ll shift it there for you - it won’t create a ticket, but they will see it there and can log it.)
Could also be great for re-running a portion of an engrave without re-running the whole thing. I’ve had plenty of designs that could have benefited from and extra pass in just one little spot
In the meantime - if you have that situation you can open the lid, tape down some aluminum foil over the part that was already done, close the lid and hit go again. As long as you don’t move your material, or the laser head, it’ll print in the exact same place - and since it can’t cut through the aluminum it won’t re-cut the sections you’ve covered.
It won’t save any time, but it will allow you to “restart” your design.
I put the shiny side down because I often can’t stop myself from watching the laser hit, but no issues that have been reported here - and yeah, a 40W laser of this type can’t cut any metal, and despite being thin it’s still metal. That being said someone on here managed to sort of cut through a really thin sheet of it, but they had to do a ridiculously low speed and high power to succeed
The main problem is that metal conducts heat. So the heat flows away through the sheet of foil instead of building up in one spot. So it can’t get hot enough to burn through. You need a really high intensity laser to cut it.
There’s also the problem of the laser reflecting rather than being absorbed and turned into heat. I’m not sure how reflective aluminum is in the wavelength used by the Glowforge, but I’d assume a lot of it reflects.
