Introducing Snapmark (September 2018)

Still no snapmarks… :sob:

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Still waiting…no email…no magnet… sigh

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For as long as I’ve had my pro, I’d yet to do a full pass-through job. Did my first yesterday, a cardboard test run for a catapult. Great results! I was also pleasantly surprised that snapmarks lightly scored into cardboard are good enough for snapping. Impressive!

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500/10

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I’m surprised that was dark enough to read. (They must be tweaking this heavily behind the scenes.)

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How I used snapmarks in making this:

This was a first try at something I haven’t done before. I might have wanted to go back and do a second pass… I might want to tweak it, and at the price I had quoted when I thought I was using linoleum, then changed my mind and bought rubber… well. I didn’t want a lot of waste. (like Glowforge, I had promised something and then discovered materials and timelines were not what I had estimated.)

So I designed, I tested in cheap wood, I designed again, and I really tried to zero in my file. I chose snapmarks in case I’d want to go back.

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It turned out a good plan. With a stamp, you want the image on top of the block as well as on the rubber.

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Also, I engraved the stamp rectangle but didn’t like the edges and decided I wanted to go back and cut a skirt around the design. My edges are great because - after the fact - I engraved beyond my margin. (Or shrunk my outline to fit inside my margin… whatever.)

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I didn’t know HOW I would use it exactly at the beginning; but Snapmarks helped me make a professional product without wasting the material that I felt was in short supply. It helped me iterate something new to me, again, with less waste.

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Nice job! :grinning:

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I got snapmarks a couple of days ago. I’ve been doing the testing using cardboard and I got the same results tim did. I was surprised it could find the lightly scored fiducials on the cardboard but it worked fine.

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@bonny REPORT: At just after 9:30 CST on my machine, a snap quit early with no message and left the head near the center of the machine. I tried to resnap, and the alignment was obviously off. The head hit the right edge of the machine and made a grating noise. Power cycle, and all was well, snap successful.

Just had another such event at 1:11 CST… This time snapping worked, but the head hit the left edge when I started the job. Did it twice in a row, after a restart. I’m repositioning to try again.

Third time’s a charm! I slid my piece to a slightly different position and the process succeeded. I hope you can get useful logs from the aborted jobs despite my power cycles…

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What did you open the file in? I am using Inkscape and the size of the Snapmark markers is slightly off from the recommended size. No problem I just resized them. My question is, do I need to change the size of the cutouts for the pencils also? I can measure them to find out but wanted to know if others have ran into this.

Probably. If the Snapmarks resized, so did the rectangles. (You might still be able to get pencils into them though.)

Edit: Original size for the rectangles was 190.47 mm X 7.27 mm.

@Jules will know better than I. I simply resized the Snapmarks according to the directions. The pencil slots fit the pencils I have perfectly.

I used Adobe Illustrator.

Let us know how your pencils turn out!

Okay…checked the Poll results, thanks for voting! :grinning:

Since the last two don’t outnumber the first one, it looks like the “Ayes” have it.

I’ll limit displaying them to this thread though, and there is an easy way to avoid seeing them…just click on the little blue icon under the timeline, and choose Muted for the thread.


Okay, this one is a writeup on a test performed in late June, to see how the Snapmarks handled aligning split engraves.

**Split Engraving Alignment Tests **
(Birch ply - 0.20")

I took a bitmap image into Photoshop, removed the background and split it into two PNG files. Then brought those into Illustrator to create the split image SVG file.

I engraved the first half of the fish, then shifted the whole shebang and let the Snapmarks realign the engravings.

Results were perfect: :wink:

If you look really closely at the results though, and I mean really closely, you can see a minute thread about half the width of a human hair where I thought it didn’t align correctly:

(Ignore the black line out to the left side…that was something I deliberately added so I could find the join once the image was processed.)

Then I ran a straight up engrave of both the top and the bottom in one operation for a control.

A closeup on the second engraving shows the same 1 pixel wide misalignment that the first one did…

Which means: The problem was in the file!

The alignment from the Snapmarks was perfect. (And while I still haven’t figured out a good way to split a raster image that doesn’t result in a pixel wide gap, the results are so close with this that a touch with a colored pencil takes care of it.) :smile:

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Very awesome.
Now if only I can has some snapmarks PLZ!?
:rofl:

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I zapped a pencil this weekend. It worked as expected. I hope Snapmark is promoted to a real feature.

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Here is a project I did a couple weeks ago for a client… using snapmarks on my basic glowforge.
“Wait… you can engrave silverware?!?”
I went into the technical detail of how it wasn’t really engraving but fusing material, so really I was laser printing on the stainless steel.
They heard “blah blah blah laser printing on silverware.”
And a couple weeks later they handed me an 80-piece set of flatware.

They run tours in Southern Utah National Parks - featuring RV accommodations and campsite meals. They wanted their logo on their flatware.

I used a variation of cermark/thermark with some copper mica mixed in… you can only detect that color in good light; but anybody sitting by a fire enjoying their steak in the evening will get that copper glint off their fork.

The client was happy and showed it off to a buddy who liked it enough to model it in a session for his photography portfolio…


I really like a happy client.
Thank you snapmark.

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Well that’s a nice niche market for Snapmarks! I wonder how many hoteliers, restaurateurs, campground operators, fishing camp operators and halfway houses would like to have their flatware branded?

Bunch I’ll bet! :slightly_smiling_face:

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That’s awesome. Thanks for the images and info!!!

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Sounds good Dan. As a Pro (hardware) user
it makes sense to me for it to be a Pro feature at a bare minimum and ideally all should be able to enable this. If that isn’t feasible, I could see this being a purchasable module for users who need it.

(Edited / removed mostly because there was some crazy sensitivity and I was misunderstood. Clearly the mob rules the community.)

Thanks GF team !

Joe

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I take offense and the implication that us basic users won’t understand it. Hate to tell you but I use very frequently for my business and produce more products than before.

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