Introducing Snapmark (September 2018)

that’s pretty cool. i wonder if they have other things in the hopper for that mounted camera.

I feel like I shouldn’t tell glowforge this… but the camera feature is about $6K for the trotec; not sure for epilog.

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:heart::heart: SNAPMAAAAAAAAAAAARKS!!! :heart::heart:

IMG_2643

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Thats what I call Accuracy! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I take it you’re pleased.

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Oh, YES! My granddaughter is, too. I made her a handful of pencils with her name on them for school. Open template file, throw in some text, convert to curves and merge it, duplicate and align across the 8 pencil slots (hmmm, gotta try cloned text in Inkscape and see if that could go even faster!), save and send to GF. Grab the cardboard template from where I hung it on the pegboard, toss it in the GF with a couple of magnets, insert pencils. Open file in GFUI, set material height, “ignore” template and snapmarks, select custom “Pencil” setting for engraving, click the magnet, wait for snap, click print.

Snapmarks plus custom material settings make for a really smooth flow!

I have an SVG I made pre-snapmarks, but in anticipation of getting them, I added them to it. It contains the pattern for my Floral Vase , which requires two-sided engraving, but also during one of my “too tired to do anything but too bored to just lie there” periods I designed a whole bunch of wooden flower parts and filled the sheet with them, like this:

I cut the full sheet yesterday before my granddaughter came over for her usual Friday night sleepover, in case she wanted to paint some of the flowers. (She wanted to paint ONE, and then she wanted me to play Minecraft with her. ;P) So just as an experiment, before we headed back upstairs I put the remaining cutout board back in the GF, and when I got my laptop fired up for Minecraft I took a second to pop into the GFUI and tell it to snap. I really didn’t think it would work, because of all the small shapes cut out of the board that are similar in size to the snapmarks – BUT IT DID!!!

I am so excited.

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I’m amazed it found the Snapmarks in all of that. Wow.

(I couldn’t find them at first)

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I’m excited to try the Snapmark feature on my GF, so I tried a simple test:

Two “bracket” score lines whose end points should line up, positioned between two Snapmarks.

  1. Printed the Snapmark scores and the top bracket.
  2. Moved the work piece.
  3. Hit the Snapmark button, got the “Scanning for Snapmarks…” message, aaaaand…
  4. Nothing happened.

Any idea what’s going on?

Best,
Rod

You will need to have a set of identical snapmarks in the second file, the one with the top bracket, as well, in order to snap to the existing (printed) snapmarks.

This is similar to what we do for Passthrough alignment, so you might benefit by reading these notes…all the way to the bottom section on Passthrough alignment.

(If I understand what you are trying to do here.)

This is actually the same file that made the marks. I ignored the bottom bracket for the first score, then the top bracket for the test.

Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening at all when I hit the Snapmarks magnet icon, other than show me that status message that it’s scanning. The message shows up for about 8 seconds, and then disappears. I see no indication that it did anything. :thinking:

Ahhhh…okay, you might want to try checking the size of the marks. Some drawing programs are resizing them at input. (First part of the notes.)

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@Jules one thing I noticed, Inkscape only allows 3 numbers to the right of the decimal and rounds up on the height of the Snapmark to 0.405. Whether that has any effect hard to say I haven’t seen any effect when i use them…

Checked that right away…

They’re coming in at 0.3322 x 0.4047, just as they should.

(I’m using Illustrator.)

20%20PM

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One thing i did as suggested by the staff was put the Snapmarks on their own layer and lock it in, then put the jig design on a separate layer and lock that in.

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The Snapmarks, top bracket, and bottom bracket scores are on 3 separate layers. The Snapmarks are locked.

Huh! Only other thing I can think of might be the placement…but they are not at the far reaches of the bed where they are …don’t know. It might be machine specific. (Which you don’t want.)

I’d try another test on a different section of the scrap there… so you can bring the marks up to the center of the bed. (Worth a shot.)

Yeah, I really don’t want it to be a problem specific to my machine.

Any idea if this is something like an update thing, where the GF needs to be on for some period of time to download new code?

If there’s a change, it will update itself silently before beginning the initial Startup calibration routine the next time you turn on the machine. (It’s a very good idea to turn on the machine and then let it warm up for ten minutes or so before sending any commands to it, to let it finish any updates.)

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Well, consider me stumped, then… as far as I can tell, I’m doing everything right. Not sure what to try next.

Bummer, too, as I’ve been putting off several projects in anticipation of this feature.

Here’s a silly question: When the app says it’s scanning for Snapmarks, what do you see happening? Is the GF actually moving, or is this scan being done entirely in the image captured by the lid camera when you first closed the lid?

Since I see nothing happening, I’m not sure whether it’s a hardware thing happening, or just a cloud-based software thing.