I am so sick of this Glowforge I have. I have nothing but problems. Why in the world would you design a machine with a curved camera??? It literally doesn’t come close to engraving where I want it to. I have ruined so much stuff I could buy another laser cutter. I am so sick of dealing with this machine.
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Which machine do you have? The camera is warranted to be accurate to within 1/2”, but most of us get much better results than that. Are you using the set focus tool prior to placing your artwork?
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Almost all lasers with camera views use a fisheye lens, otherwise a camera so close to the bed wouldn’t be able to capture all of it. I get quite accurate placement with the camera so long as I use the “set focus” button first, but you don’t have to rely on the camera, you can make and use jigs for pixel perfect alignment every time. Search that word if you want to learn more.
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I’ll make it even easier:
And while you’re at it #15 too:
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I always use the set focus and it is more than a half inch off and I have the pro
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That is atypical, most of us get with less than 0.1” accuracy easily (like see the contest below that @jules and I had back in the day when I engraved my initials on a mustard seed and she engraved a grain of rice. There was a calibration run you could do (it used a sheet of draftboard and printed edge to edge and then the camera imaged it and produced a proper de-warp map to get pinpoint accuracy. And you could increase that using SnapMarks (if that is still a thing) which let you get extremely high repeatable accuracy on jigs. Also worse than 0.5” is like a loose belt or something (just press gently on the drive belts and make sure they are relatively tight, not guitar string tight but firm, if the nut on the idler wheel is loose it will slide and the belt is then too loose to accurately position the head). Also make sure the lens for the camera isn’t coated with gunk.
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Thank you I will give all of that a check. How do I calibrate? I search calibration and I get tons of really old messages so is there more current way to do it as things change over time?
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Actually, I think the lid camera is accurate to within 1/4” - not 1/2”. Here is the link to the lid camera calibration program. If you would care to share an example showing where you expected your print compared to the actual print at the end of a job, we can probably help troubleshoot.
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Yeah, supposed to be within 1/4.” My first glowforge was always spot on, like exact. Second one, not so much, but because it was within 1/4” after calibration, support said it was good and nothing else had to be done on it…just annoys me.
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Glowforge uses some fancy math to go from fisheye to square, however, the height you get from “Set Focus” is extremely sensetive.
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