I use a Google Form and Google Sheet to log every job I run on my Glowforge. It’s really easy to fill out and has come in handy when I want to look back at previous jobs for settings / times / and materials. I have made a copy for your use how ever you see fit. It’s not too complicated and feel free to adapt it to your workflow. It is available here.
To copy this to your Drive
Highlight the Form and the Sheet
Right Click - “Add to my Drive”
Go to your Drive
Highlight JUST the Sheet
Right Click - “Make Copy” (this will copy a unique version to your drive for you to use)
Remove the original Shared set from your drive.
Go to your Drive and open your Sheet
Click the menu item “Form / Go to live form”
Start using it
A couple things to note about this. You can copy the URL for the live form and bookmark it so you don’t have to navigate through the sheet every time (or add it to the link section on the Stats page). You will have to add in job numbers in the sheet (I wait until I have a few and just fill them in - I really have no need for it to have a specific number). The sheet doesn’t handle time as I’d like it - there could be a script route to make this work but I just edit the sheet every so often to reconcile cuts. You will have to select the column and go to the “Format” menu and change the column format to “Duration”. The Stats page won’t add it up unless this is done. I also do the job number at the same time (usually at the end of the cutting session).
I’m here for questions and if anyone has suggestions or edits feel free I want to make this excellent
Nice! Thanks for sharing! I have kind of similar logs for some of my other equipment and have found it valuable to be able to refer back to similar past jobs. I have been thinking about what I need to track for laser jobs.
Thanks Mark! I’ve downloaded your log sheet and will start using it. So far I’ve been terrible at doing a proper log. But mainly because I’ve used the Proofgrade so I simply haven’t had to worry much about the specific settings for my material.
I have used three pieces of my own wood from my shop, I created an engrave and cut test strip for all of them, and just used that as my test for settings.
I’ll have this open next to my tab for the GFUI and will try and do a much better job of logging my jobs.
I’ve brought this up in the past, but if Glowforge would provide hooks into IFTTT, we could automate things like this. Or less practical use cases like sending out a tweet when a print is done, or send you an SMS when an error occurs.
Shouldn’t be too hard for Glowforge to trigger a REST API since it’s already cloud-connected.
You can also create another sheet (or add it to the Stat sheet) which has generic settings for non Proofgrade material. I might start doing that but haven’t used much other material yet. A lot of time if I use standard settings I just leave those fields blank with the future assumption that they won’t change.
I log mainly for the time - will come in handy when I start doing paying jobs
I also think that this Log could be incorporated into the Webapp. I bet they store all this information for diagnostic purposes anyway. A quick UI and the job log could be built in.
THAT sounds perfect. I know that I do some repetitive stuff just trying to figure out the best way to design files for the laser. I’ll get sucked into a “mode” of make changes, send to laser, notice something I want to change, make more changes, send to laser, etc… until I like what I’m seeing. I either need the settings to be collected for me, or purposefully add a log to my mental routine.
I think that’s what the ‘Time’ entry is for. ‘Job Date’ is at the top, but there is no ‘Job Time’. Perhaps ‘Time’ should be relabeled as ‘Job Duration’?
Being able to recall settings has been requested many times. Doing a quick search lands me on this example:
And it is in the hopper.
The recalled prior settings would include details for every colored item in the SVG, so it would wouldn’t be necessary to write this tedious information down somewhere else. I don’t have direct experience with the SVG format, but it’s got to have user tags in the thing - having those tags list ‘job description’, ‘material’, and ‘comments’ would allow the UI to add those automatically to the recalled settings.
Yes @AhnoldZ is correct I use the ‘Time’ entry for the job duration. Initially I had a start time and end time and had the sheet calculate the duration but I kept forgetting to add in the start time because I would get excited by the glowing button sooo I just decided to make is ‘Time’ and enter what the Glowforge give me as a time.
I love this idea. A simple webhook call with a Glowforge specified payload that includes the job settings and perhaps even a photo of the results from the bed camera after cutting would be amazing.
This is true but I think it’s also incredible useful to have a log of past jobs. Especially when I can look at something I’ve made and ask “how long did that take?” or “what resolution was this”. Making custom materials and having the UI store them would be a nice addition to the log. With the comments I will also note things to try like “didn’t cut all the way through next use 10% more power”
Nice, but I have more data I capture in my Excel sheet. I almost never do something with just a single cut or engrave operation. I track the details by color in the source file (the SVG which I also track so I know which version of a project I used). So by color I track the operation, power, speed, focus, # passes, LPI and use whichever is appropriate for the operation. That way I can recreate the job (until the hopper lets the request to save settings get developed). For PG engraves I track the color (light, med, dark) that matches my dropdown selection. I track the in the order of operations so I can recreate that too. I grab the job time from the Print pop-up so I know the time it should take. I don’t do any of the stats analysis you do though.
@marmak3261 has a database tool he’s created to do similar tracking too if I recall correctly.
Wow - thorough log! I wish I had the patients for that haha. I realized that this form doesn’t allow for performing multiple operations. I’d be interested to see @marmak3261 's database
