Nothing that follows has context without the OP but yeah, whatever.
I’m not sure if you are arguing with me on purpose or think you are arguing against but accidentally arguing with me?
We were promised precision placement, and I paid for a pro so yes, I am looking for passthrough and materials flip. I’m not particularly happy to not have these. I don’t tend to squeeze my spleen the way some do, but no, I’m not happy to not have these.
Will we ever see what was promised? I don’t know, I hope so.
The problem comes in when everyone can’t or chooses not to understand what is clearly stated in the OP of this thread.
So yeah, you are free to be displeased with the lack of the originally promised features, but snapmarks just is not them.
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I do think that snapmarks addressed the precision alignment, the fact that snapmarks went beyond that precision alignment was a bonus.
I’m not arguing with you about what was promised on snapmarks. I was expressing my disappointment and the fact that I am not happy.
In fact I agree with what you quoted from Dan, they were not part of the original promise when the machine was first announced, however precision placement was.
I think you will agree 1/4 inch margin of error is not precision placement. Yes I know there are hacks I can do to create jigs that will help, and that is not part of the “it just works” mantra I was sold on. Because it does not just work. So when I saw snapmarks were announced I got excited that a solution was being offered, yes it was a lottery and even if I won I would be upset for those that didn’t. They had something that solved problems for their user base and pulled back on it. They could have, in the least said that they were discontinuing development and offered the feature as is to everyone, but they didn’t. Why ? We don’t know.
I will be happy when they offer something to replace it and I can finally use the machine to the full potential and it does what they said it would do.
I am also happy they came out with the camera alignment calibration, however after cleaning my head it appears it is off again. (side topic: I wonder if I need to waste a sheet of draft board every time I clean the head? ) So the 1/4 inch margin of error is now smaller, but that still depends on where you are cutting, and it is still not accurate enough.
Like you I am hopeful they come out with something to solve the passthrough / mat flipping alignment.
-G
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Good news, you don’t! You can either just mask over a previous calibration piece or use any very flat, light colored material the same size.
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Yes, with your thoughts further fleshed out, we agree more than disagree. Everyone is disappointed that no one is getting what was promised, including glowforge.
I do, sub-mm is precision, not 1/4".
That is weird and should not happen. Unless you move the unit, not the head, the whole unit, simply rebooting and letting it recenter should put you back where you were? Anyway, no, don’t waste a sheet of proofgrade, mask one you used before.
Something you might want to do while we wait for further improvements, map your bed, so you know precisely how accurate placement is in different parts of the bed. I did this after I got a good alignment (took three tries) now I know that for me, the lower right is going to be fubar no matter what, but I also have sections that are sub-mm precise.
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I think we actually have a plausible idea of why they did not offer it to everyone. Throughout the Snapmarks rollout, they made it clear that any machine’s ability to get the feature had something to do with the “calibration data” collected during manufacturing that particular machine. They had an automated, or semi-automated system that would set up Snapmarks for the machines for which activating Snapmarks was easy, due to the quality of that machine’s calibration data.
We do not know what kind of data they were talking about, but they made the big picture pretty clear if you read all their posts.
The fact that they stopped the rollout implies, but does not prove, that some machines would have required too much work to get their Snapmarks, or that they might not be able to get the feature at all. I think they had to call it off because it was impractical or even impossible to do it for everyone.
So there is my level-headed speculation. Now my wild conjecture: I suspect that the reason we have not yet seen any real progress on the automagical passthrough feature is that, like with Snapmarks, there is some kind of machine-to-machine variation that is making them pull their hair out, and what they want to do cannot be done for each machine. I think that eventually we are going to see them roll back some of their promises, like they did with the air filter.
(I did say “speculation,” y’all, don’t shoot the speculator.)
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It shouldn’t be. Did you power off before removing the head, so you didn’t accidentally bump it out of alignment?
Yeah I always power it down when connecting or disconnecting wires 
I have some large masking rolls so I will mask off a empty board and rerun the calibration. Also going to check the levelness of the crumb tray as I’ve removed and cleaned that too.
Thanks!
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This is pretty close! But it’s not impractical/impossible, it’s just that we only committed enough time to gather the data we needed to do Pro Passthrough. Doing more would have required more engineering time at the expense of actually building Pro Passthorugh. So now we’re working on automagical Pro Passthrough, because the features we promised are higher priority than the ones we didn’t.
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@Dan, thank you for that clarification. It was very easy to look at the Snapmark distribution and come to a less optimistic interpretation.
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@dan, I’m sure you can’t say one way or the other, I‘d be delighted if your message implies that continued development on Snapmarks for the rest of us is still a priority, albeit a lower one.
I’m a Pro owner, so pass through is still interesting to me - but I would find Snapmarks far more useful than pass through for the projects I want to do (and am putting off without).
Not complaining, just casting a vote.
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Absolutely. Snapmarks is something we’re considering in the future. One other piece I neglected to mention, though, was that it was expensive to support. Since support costs are included in the price of your initial purchase, we can’t add free extra features that create a lot of support tickets. We’ll have to solve that somehow if we are going to roll it out again.
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I’ve mentioned it before but I’ll say it again. I know folks would appreciate even having it as an ‘unsupported’ feature until you are ready to revisit it again. Even just a quick popup in the UI saying that it is unsupported would go a long way to cut down support tickets that would pop up from any errors.
I’m fortunate to have it and it works amazing for my workflow but I know I just got lucky and more folks would love to have it.
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Unfortunately calling it unsupported does not reduce support tickets. 
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I do find it absolutely ridiculous that on the purchase page it is suggested that the ‘Pro’ model is a $16,000 value, has multiple cameras in the unit, yet it does not include fiducial alignment.
You can buy a vinyl cutter for $300 that can do fiducial alignment at a big box store, but a ‘$16,000 value’ pro laser cutting production machine does not have this or absolute positioning as a standard feature.
The suggestion made at one point that this could be a ‘purchased’ feature in the future is really tone deaf. I owned a Craft Robo Pro (vinyl cutter) over 10 years ago that had this feature.
The ‘support tickets’ statement and the suggestion that it is a huge burden is so insulting. Most issues are resolved by community members responses well before an admin is even involved in the thread. The staff role is usually to type ‘I see your issue is resolved, i am going to close this thread’.
Most of the snapmark threads are people begging to have the feature on their machine, or asking why it was removed from their machine.
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The complaint isn’t really snapmarks themselves, it is the lack of promised features (passthrough, precise placement via lid camera) that makes snapmarks valuable as a partial delivery on the commitment. If we had those, nobody would be upset about snapmarks going away.
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Did you run the Camera Calibration? That and the Set Focus tool have done an excellent job of correcting for the early alignment issues.
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Yes, I ran the Camera Calibration. Accuracy to within a quarter inch is fine for placing a cut/engrave onto a piece of unused material, but it’s not accurate enough to place a cut/engrave so that it’s positioned precisely to align with the material - I still have to set up a jig (or SnapMarks) if I want precise alignment to existing material. For example, engraving front and back of a medallion can’t be done with just the camera, because even a slightly off-center engrave looks wrong.
The issue is that the lid camera has an extreme angle, and not great resolution, so for precise placement (e.g. cuts aligning) the Glowforge needs to use the head camera. That’s the approach that Dan’s been talking about for years now, and that’s how SnapMarks are precise, but it’s not otherwise used by the Glowforge.
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That’s what Set Focus does. If you use it on the center of the medallion, it will be treated as if it is directly underneath the lid camera. (It corrects for the camera distortion in that spot.) I’m getting` within a mm accuracy when I use it, even out at the edges of the bed.
Although, I do agree the Snapmarks are definitely better for some things. (Print and Cut files and re-use of jigs mainly.) So i’d absolutely like to see them do something with it down the road. I don’t have a problem with them finishing up on the filter and the Passthrough software first though - I think more people are waiting on those and it’s been a long wait for most of them.
It’s all triage. I can wait my turn. I’d really like to encourage everyone to be patient. And try to enjoy the releases when they come out…it keeps things exciting, instead of frustrating. 
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But don’t you already have Snapmarks? I guess I’m not sure what we’re waiting for. There is absolutely no promise that we’ll ever get Snapmarks if we don’t already have them. There’s no promise that we’ll get anything at all in the ballpark. I’m wishing for them, but not waiting; it’s been well over a year now.
I think it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that we can’t be happy with one set of things because we’re disappointed with another, though. I love my GF, even if everything isn’t perfect. Heck, I love my husband and kids and they aren’t perfect either! (And I’d like to think they feel the same)
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