I haven’t had much time to work on this over the past week with the release of a new game and starting a new job it’s been pretty crazy. However, today I am pushing out an update the two big features support for macOS High Sierra (I’m not sure how they managed to break chrome so badly in one os release) and adding synchronization between browsers. The full set of features that have been added are below.
Version 0.3.0
Settings wil now be synchronized between browsers, storage space is limited and the amount of used/available space is displayed at the top of the screen. Any deleted materials will not be synchronized, these materials must be deleted manually on both sides. I have estimated is that around ~150 different material settings can be synchronized before all the space is used. If a material does not appear to be syncing, open it for edit and save it without making changes this will force an update.
macOS High Sierra support. The chrome plugin will now scroll and open correctly.
Any partially created materials will be saved when the extension is closed, allowing users to read settings from a separate tab without having to worry about much data loss.
Minor Features
LPI settings will be displayed alongside the Scan Gap field.
The ability to clone materials has been added.
The material manager can be opened in any tab. The synchronization icon will be grey if it is not connected to the GlowForge application.
Maybe a bug, maybe something I am not understanding. But when I set a power level in the Extension, if I set the artwork to “manual” to check the settings, the power level is always -1.
So if I specify a power level of 10 for my 3mm Depron foam, and then I select that material for my project, and then I change the PG setting to “manual” the power level displayed will be 9, not 10. Speed settings do not do this, though.
Definitely a bug, it appears that the GFUI attempts to fit 101 values onto the range 1 - 100. This results in every power setting lower than 50 being off by one. I will make a quick update in the morning to follow their calculations which will resolve this.
I haven’t tested this extensively (OK… just once), but it looks like if you edit a setting for an already set up material, it cumulatively eats up your “cloud space”.
Not to deny that there is a sync bug, that is pretty likely. Testing cloud sync is 100% manual at the moment due to browser api restrictions and lack of test framework provided by Google.
One thing to note is that when you edit a material it is first removed from cloud sync and then added back to cloud sync with the updated settings. The material will likely be slightly larger if additional settings were added. By default, I only upload the minimal amount of data, e.g. values that have been set, to the cloud for sync. This means more space will be consumed on average after editing a material.
I will do some more testing now, I have some free time this morning and finally have a reasonable environment where I can easily test all three OSes at once.
I debated posting this here, but felt that I ought to.
I feel like there is something going on behind the scenes that is impacting the settings set by the Material Manager, or the settings displayed on-screen aren’t correct.
Here’s my reasoning and thinking behind this; the vast majority of what I’m cutting are these chipboard puzzles. I’ve nailed the settings down to a science just about: 260/100/2 passes, every single time. The chipboard calipers perfect on every sheet / the photo paper is the same 10 mil / the glue process is done with an automated roller glue machine - so the finished product is about as consistent as consistent can be. And the cutting is incredibly consistent.
When this (Material Manager) was first made public, I went ahead and set up the two materials I use the most: the .08" chipboard and the 1/4 Woodcraft Baltic Birch with settings that I’ve nailed down through lots of testing. The past few days I’ve been cutting the baltic birch for some other projects and not doing puzzles, and not using the material manager (because the cuts for that are puzzle cuts and a different set up than just raw baltic birch cuts).
Late last night, I started cutting jigs to get set up for making puzzles today to get caught up. I noticed that the jigs were not cutting like they ought to. I made an edit to the materials and slowed it down (per my post last night on this). Close, but not there. Thinking little of it, I glued everything up and started cutting puzzles first thing this morning. Every single one I’ve had to go through and finish up with an Xacto knife today. I cleaned / inspected the lens/windows/mirror. I debated whether the humidity was messing things up (only 55% - about normal). I edited the material settings and slowed things down to 240 - and that was a hair better but not much.
I guess I’m a little dense because I didn’t try just using uncertified material and manual settings until this evening. The first puzzle I cut using the 240/100/2 settings (that I had to adjust down to in the material manager) blasted through the chipboard. Moved things back up to 260/100/2 and its cutting perfect, like it should…
No idea what could be the root cause behind that, but it certainly seems that the settings are not consistent between setting them in the Material Manager and setting them in the Uncertified Materials/Manual boxes.
If you’re right it should be easy to test it. You know how your materials cut, you could do a single puzzle piece on one browser with the extension, and another from another browser without it. I’m sure the author would welcome a detailed report if there is a problem.
Didn’t quite have time to “test” because I was under the (self-imposed) gun of procrastination and would have to wait for glue to set up, etc.
I basically ran those tests though by cutting one full puzzle with the Material Manager settings and then another full puzzle with unknown material+manual settings (of the same settings as the Material Manager settings) and blew through the material (as it should have). A third (immediate) follow-up cut of a full puzzle, with the manual settings adjusted to faster (260 vs 240 Material Manager) resulted in a typical cut that my testing showed it would.
I released a fix (0.3.1) for the power settings last night it should’ve rolled out by now and after some hesitation, I also added a max power checkbox to make the experience the same as the GFUI.
I can’t believe I missed this until now. That you, @icirellik, can’t guess at how many hours you have in this. I know you did it for yourself originally, but thank you for mucking around with the rest of us and sharing your work.
The last couple of days I have had issues getting the data from the extension to appear in the GFUI. I am running 0.31 of the extension. Mac OS 10.13.4 Chrome 65.0.3325.181 I have tried changing a setting in one of the materials and clicking the sync button, which goes from yellow-green. When I search for the custom material it does not find it.
I found I had a browser window open from yesterday that still had the material selected, but the browser window I opened today can’t find it.
Having a bout of possible temporary blindness here… are there options for ordered dithering / Floyd Steinburging / power varying of the engraves? I can’t seem to see any…
When engraving rastors you are given manual option for dithering (dot and pattern) and varying power. There is no option to select the specific type of dithering. (There use to be though, so you may find posts talking about it.)
I have noticed in my usage that sometimes the materials do not sync when there are multiple GFUI tabs open. For now I would suggest closing any additional tabs and refreshing the page.
This can also occur if you have multiple copies of the plugin installed, though unless you are actively compiling from source I don’t think this is the cause.
You are not blind. This is the last major feature that I want to implement. It’s also on my shortlist for as it would also make my life much simpler too
