I’m curious if the camera will ever allow for a .5 focal height? It just seems so odd to me that the max thickness we can cut/engrave is such an odd increment. To be able to engrave and cut .5" material would be far more usable than .433" seeing as it’s possible to get material that is .5 thick, but probably not so easy to get .433" thick material…
I think that is a physical limitation of how far off the bed the air assist is. If you can keep all of your cuts and engraves in front of that air assist, you might be able to get that full .5"
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I’m pretty sure that this is a physical limitation of lens travel within the head. However, I can tell you that I have cut 1/2" birch plywood successfully with multiple passes. There is more charring than on thinner material but it is possible. I also haven’t noticed engraves on those .5" materials to be of any less quality than my other engraves.
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The user interface now allows 0.5" entry. They made the change quite some time ago. Whether or not it changes the actual lens focus to 0.5" or not I don’t know but the UI allows it. I engraved something that thick yesterday.
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I’m curious, if you were to engrave onto a piece of .5" material where placement was important, was there any alignment issues?
Not any more than usual. Placement can be off up to 1/4". Alignment is best on most machines toward the center. The laser focus is completely separate from the lid camera placement which requires material height to dewarp the lid image for placement. The UI accepts 0.5 and it seems the dewarping algorithm does too.
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I thought that one of our departed forum denizens did a teardown and determined that the focus mechanism didn’t physically change past a certain point? Like, entering 0.500" gave you the same results as 0.433" ? Wasn’t that a minor scandal from a year ago? Heh.
Yeah, what wasn’t clear to me was it sounded like the hardware was capable of more but the S/W was just not providing the resolution. There was an announcement some time ago about a S/W change that provided improved focusing resolution. I haven’t cared enough to chase the specifics. Either way, the a ability to enter 0.5" for the UI Material Height is the only thing that affects placement accuracy.
What’s the Y-axis distance between the beam and the air assist? About 4"?
to be fair it also doesn’t matter if the focus is +/-.010" either. You will not see the difference in performance or detail. It matters more for the camera and dewarping the image than anything else on the laser.
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Don’t tell some people that. 
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I tried! I made a whole thread about it lol.
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