Yes if they have different colors. Each color in your design allows you to separately defined the operation & parameters. Within a specific operation - e.g. engrave of the red items, you can’t change on the fly say to do the top of an object with more power than the bottom of the object - you’d need to create two objects and assign different colors in your design software.
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That sounds great. Pretty flexible. Me likes.
Intuitively focusing in the middle feels like it would give the deepest cut and the straightest edge because you have equal power density fall off either side of the middle of your material. So you might get a bowed edge but less likely to get a slanted edge as top and bottom should be pretty equal.
Obviously I have never used a laser, so intuition could be wrong.
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it depends on the goal. if it’s to cut a big channel through, it deffo can be. i think the difference is that for cutting thicker metal, it’s less an option and more a requirement.
It would be interesting to look at the different edge profiles resulting from cutting acrylic with the focus at different heights.
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Can you show me a screenshot of where it is?
Exactly. That’s a frustration every woodworker had to go through that we hope to spare our customers.
It’s all very approximate, since as soon as you start using your bed it begins to deform slightly. It’s used for dewarping, but that inaccuracy is one of the reasons lid camera alignment is only approximate right now.
When you autofocus, it measures the distance to the head, and then focuses very precisely.
Right now it always focuses on the surface. Wood and acrylic both produce total internal reflection at 10600nm so that produces excellent results throughout the cut.
Indeed!
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I love tidbits like this.
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Indeed! Imagine this test:
Cut the parallel red lies first a various focus settings, then cut out the square. When viewed on edge, the differences in focus may be visually noticeable, especially on the 1/4".
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I think it was 1" before they planed it. In the UK it is marked with the finished size in mm, so we don’t have the problem although there is a tolerance of course. We get sizes like 18, 34 and 44mm for planed wood.
ish. it definitely used to be 1-inch before planing, but since we’ve moved to standardized sizing and modern industrial planers, they often start out less and remove less to maximize the lumber you can create from one piece of wood.
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This has actually led to some problems for me recently. I was cutting some leather yesterday and it detected as “standard” leather but that didnt tell me how thick “standard” is. None of my cuts would go through, so I had to pick manually from the list, measure with my calipers, change operations to manual to check the thickness that was set, and compare that to the measured thickness. So in this case it actually caused me a bit of extra work and a little bit of headache.
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i mean, i understand the danger of providing options for everyone’s taste and preference and end up with an irreversibly cluttered UI, but this seems like a good area to have one. the default can easily remain thin / standard / whatever, with a tickbox buried in the settings to use “actual” dimensions (and you can even put a warning about the standards / focus change / etc to insure against complaints from novice users).
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I personally am not a fan of subjective wording or naming. It provides little to no context. It’s more frustrating than going to a restaurant and asking for a small and they tell you they only have medium, large, and extra large.
It’s the reason why we moved away from arbitrary measurements to the metric system etc as well. I’d rather have a number that might be off by a few microns than have a subjective word that only makes sense to its creator.
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Leather though, albeit from only my reading, seems to vary quite a bit and is more referred to as some measure of ounces, right? Ahh…so I see what you mean I think. Despite folks selling leather in “ounces”, if Glowforge could provide settings based on the leather’s thickness, perhaps that would get one closer to where one needs to be to cut through it?
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The label on the leather itself just says thin, standard, etc. I’m pretty sure I received a thick piece of leather with a “standard” sticker on it by accident, which means 2 things:
1 - I have no way of knowing what they think standard is. Is it 2-3 oz or 5 oz? Still don’t know.
2 - obviously whoever put the stickers on that leather didn’t know what thickness “standard” was either, because the settings it gave me were for leather about half as thick as the piece that was actually in there.
It’s just a bad idea to have non measurement based names IMO
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Also the new proofgrade ply has a “medium” designation now. I have no idea what that means. Is it width? Thickness? Gloss level? Is it psychic?
The full dimensions are almost the same amount of characters as the word medium. 12x20x1/8.
Just out that and save everyone the trouble of finding a Rosetta Stone to translate that word to measurements.
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Ah, I gotcha. The 
is labeled thin, etc…I gotcha now…shucks!
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I’m not certain, but I think I put that in to support. You may want to back that up with them as well.
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Interesting. The PG leather that I have does specify the OZ weight. I got three different weights (1 oz, 2-3 oz and 5/6 oz) and that info is on the bar code for mine. Perhaps yours is from an older batch, since you’ve had your PRU much longer than I?
Some of the PG leather also indicates “thick”, etc. As a leatherworker, I’m inclined to disagree with their terminology as far as “thick” goes (they’re calling 5/6 oz leather “thick”, but I think most leatherworkers would consider thick leather to be more along the lines of 8/10 oz) … but that’s another rabbit hole. Will refrain from going too far down that one until I’ve had the chance to run a couple more experiments, and also until I’ve shared my observations w/support.
Edited to add, preemptively - I love the PG leather, so don’t freak out on that last comment, people! Nothing is wrong with it, I just have some questions and suggestions and would like to run those by support before I share them here 
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