Your process seems nice, but I wonder what happens when your material is too uniform or when there’s some kind of repeated pattern in the area of interest.
Sounds like you might be able to do most of what you want by printing out a bunch of snapmark pairs and taping them to your material with appropriate care.
(One other thing I’ve noticed, or thought I’ve noticed, is that once you’ve done the snap thing, you can still move stuff around in the GFUI. So, for example, when I was engraving pencils, I zoomed in and moved the text to align with the jig-cut lines after uploading the file.)
If the material is uniform or repeating… that’s the beauty of it… you don’t need anything special, just a dot or mark of your choosing on a piece of tape, the magnets you placed on top of the part, or whatever. You are just getting an accurate scan that you can accurately position in areas where you care about alignment.
I can’t tell you how many times now I have lasered over my magnets on the project I’m working on now. Hundreds of little foam parts and trying to get cuts in the right spot is a pain. I would mark all those locations to make sure I didn’t run them over with the cut file!
Ah, now I understand. From your first description, I thought you were saying the camera would just take a picture of the material as it was, without any added markings.
I don’t think anybody outside of Glowforge can explain why they don’t do what they don’t do. I can think of lots of features that seem possible with the hardware we have today and that I’m surprised we haven’t seen. I also know how hard it can be to prioritize a product backlog.
In an effort to resist the temptation to respond to a positive announcement with a complaint, I prefer to think of Snapmark as a sign of good things to come. We’re getting a thing we didn’t have before. This is true regardless of whether or not other problems remain.
Can’t say for sure, but if we use their fiducials it is a known thing to them. The size & format are defined. That simplifies the recognition and then the corresponding corrections they need to make to position everything. The software can look for something that seems to be the fiducial and then correct its view of it based on what the fidiucial should look like precisely, check again to see if it does and then apply that correction to everything it “sees”. If the correction doesn’t result in a precise fiducial view then it’s either not the fiducial expected or there’s a different problem so it can’t apply a bed sized correction.
Using something other than their fiducials means you’d have to have some way of telling the software what yours was and describe it mathematically exactly so the software could find it and calculate the correction needed. In a drawn project (vs photo, etc) it would be straightforward to create a self-defined fiducial mark and then indicate to the software via some kind of point & click in the GFUI where it was so it could send the camera there and calculate what it sees vs what the SVG description is and make the correction calculations. But that would require a whole bunch of other software processing that isn’t required if you use one that’s predefined by GF. So the Snapmark implementation is likely the result
I don’t think this is going to be as complicated for people to grasp as you guys think. Silhouette and cricut and whoever else have been doing essentially the same thing for a few years, with varying degrees of accurate, and people seem to work them out just fine. And they’re not all technically minded, CAD-driven people either. Pretty sure anyone who can figure out how to set up a glowforge in the first place can figure this concept out.
As a feature, it’s a good idea. Especially given how poor optical alignment is. But I’ll be really disappointed if it’s pro-only. At least until the rest of us have a way, visual or otherwise, to position things with this sort of accuracy.
I would love to test this and will look for the emblem! Please please have it available on the basic. As a new user I still am getting too much waste from the alignment changing to the left then to the right. This would save materials and make the glow forge more usable for small business. (or just making all your teacher/christmas gifts more quickly) Thank you for all you do and I’m pleased to report that we love the glow forge. We have wanted something like this for years and it allows our whole family (including the kids) to use our imagination and create. It is truly wonderful. We appreciate your team beyond what I can express. This machine is life changing. Thank you!
Jigs with pre-printed papers stuck on base boards sadly don’t sensibly work with jigs. See lots of my previous posts on this topic. I use jigs permanently on my non-pre-printed work though
I was planning on a series of alignment squares for my PNP board game stuff to use for alignment. I’ll still need to make a square edge jig but I should be able to get my alignment on those squares then toggle on the actual cuts
Snapmark is precisely one of the top features that I had expected you to have already implemented when you talked about precise alignment. Kudos for doing it.
Some other features that are essential are:
A way to have the laser show me where it thinks a point is. Every laser I’ve used in the past had this feature. Better, make it trace out the edge of what will be cut or engraved with the laser rather than having me have to check multiple points individually.
Let me tell the laser where to measure the material thickness. I have had jobs ruined because the laser measured a hole in the material that it didn’t know was there. Even better, let me define regions of different thickness so I can do a single job on a piece of material that isn’t a uniform thickness.
If you were to make these features Pro only or extra cost, that would be a big disappointment. This isn’t a cheap <$100 inkjet printer. It’s a multi-thousand dollar machine which doesn’t yet have precise, repeatable alignment. As I said elsewhere, I still love it. But, none of us are going to be happy if you’re charging for a feature that simply enables users to get their money’s worth out of the machine, and it doesn’t bode well for the future.
I think this might be impossible because of the way the laser head is designed. The red dot is fired at an angle from a fixed distance above the crumb tray, so where it lands depends on the height of your material (indeed, this is how the autofocus works). It’s also a pretty huge spot compared to machines that use it as a pointer.
I suppose the workaround here would be to measure the focus height, then move the head to an offset position to get the red dot to land where the laser will fire. So “impossible” may be the wrong word.
Anyway, the Glowforge is different from those machines, so while it might not be able to do the same things, it should be able to do different, potentially better things. E.g. why can’t I click on the bed image and have it drive over there, take a picture with the head camera, and show me a precision alignment interface? Who needs a red dot if you have that.
