I recently got my Glowforge and I’ve run into this issue twice thus far.
The head will travel over to where it wants to laser, act like it’s lasering, but it’s really just faking it. After faking it for a bit, it decides to stop and the main button lights up purple.
I tried looking up what the purple button means, and I’ve only found that it’s from ancient code years ago and it shouldn’t ever be purple.
Here’s a video I made of it:
No matter how many times I restart and retry, it’ll do it again until I get out PG draftboard and print a design on it. It’ll work, then I can put in my other material again, do the exact thing I did before and it’ll work.
Right now it prints just fine, no tricks needed.
Some other notes:
The first time it did this, I recalibrated my camera after I did my PG draftboard trick thinking that might help because I noticed my camera was looking really far “down” (towards the front) right when it started acting funny. I was unable to cut in the same spots that I’ve already cut no matter how many refocuses and refreshes I tried. After recalibrating, it seems to have fixed the camera issue.
Just before the second time it happened, I was noticing the camera starting to look “down” (towards the front) again. It’s currently still staring really far down because it’s only been about a week or so since I recalibrated, and I can’t imagine having to do that weekly.
Even though it’s currently working, I’m still concerned that it’s happened twice with my brand new unit. I’m not moving it at all. Not to mention the camera oddities.
I have a video of the first time it happened that I could upload if needed.