This only started happening after the recent software change. Now we get a few great runs then blurry and out of focus even though nothing changed in the settings or files being run. Then fine again. What’s going on? Samples shown of what it’s supposed to look like and what a bad burn does. You can see how it’s suppose to be clear. We use calipers for height so it’s always accurate.
Pro GF.
Most likely what is happing is that the glowy is taking a focus measurement and due to these being toruses the one sample sometimes is not at the right place.
What Mark said is what I was thinking, too. Issues because of being a curved surface. (Never heard the term torus…now I’ll have to look it up) 
After you hit the Print button in the app to send something to be printed, the head moves out to the area where you are wanting to print on the design and takes an auto-focus measurement by shooting a little red dot onto the material. If it hits on the area that you are wanting to engrave, that’s fine and the machine will focus correctly. With a shape like that one, the odds of it hitting in the right place go way down, and the result is that the auto-focus setting will give a defocused engrave.
For a shape like that one, you will probably always want to over-ride the focal point setting manually in the Engrave operation. If you set a value there for the focal point, it will over-ride the auto-focus measurement.
How do I override the focal point?
I just saw where you said in the engrave settings. I’ll try that. Thank you! That’s what I thought was happening because I saw the red dot on the honeycomb instead of the rings.
If you put a value in the focal height field that’s different than the material height, it will respect the focal height entry. It will still scan, but this overrides it.
Example: material height of .250”. Set the focal height to .249”.
Excellent advice. Thank you!
Whoa, you learn something new every day. Handy.
Thanks for the answers @Jules and @jbmanning5, that’s right. I’m going to close this thread - if the problem reoccurs, go ahead and post a new topic. Thanks for letting us know about this!
