I was trying to do a light engrave on leather to make this. I could actually hear a light ‘chunk’ sound sometimes, and each time I did I noticed it changed the alignment.
So I guess I won’t be using that speed anymore. oh well.
Honestly, on something that small you are taking longer using 4000 speed than you would be at 1000. The head has to use most of the bed to get up to speed, and then slow down. 4000 speed is best only for images that cover your entire bed
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Yeah, I did it again at 1000 and it worked fine, I just need to run a few more tests to get the power where I want it. 1000/15 was still a little deeper than I want. Of course that is probably going to change a bit for the next bit of leather I get.
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Someone needs to figure out a rule of thumb for when the higher speeds make sense. I want it to be something tidy like Speed/1000 in inches of width, or something like that.
Well pinned tho!
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GF can tell us. They know what their acceleration curves look like, and so how much usable space remains after the acceleration time/distance is accounted for.
We’d have to derive it empirically, which would be a huge effort.
They could, but they’re scared to just use real units for speed… those kinds of details are not their style. Too bad!
People start damaging their machines, you’d think they’d want to publish some guidelines. Doesn’t have to be too exact. It’s not like someone couldn’t put an accelerometer on the print head and measure it.
In fact, I find myself with nothing else to do some day, I could retask one of my quadcopter flight controllers, which has fairly accurate accelerometers, and only weighs a few grams. It’d require a little effort, but it’s far from impossible. The existing firmware already has a “black box” function to record the accelerometer data for post-flight analysis. Might not be all that hard at all now I think about it…
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The Universal doesn’t use real units, and I spent a lot more money on that than the Glowforge.
Either way, 4000 engrave speed is 1438 IPM or about 24 IPS. Those numbers aren’t hidden. They gave us a spreadsheet a long time ago.
That doesn’t answer the question of what’s fastest though for a given scenario. And that answer is again altered by engrave in margins, which speeds things up considerably.
To the original post, @killerspud_ut, was this a vector or a raster engraving? They were chasing down a bug on the higher speed vector engravings - not sure if it has been fixed yet.
As far as on your end, I would probably check the belt tension on the x-axis, if you haven’t already.
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^^^^^this
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I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve hit this snag!
I’ve extracted the log files from your Glowforge, and I did notice you utilized a higher speed when printing this design. Does the same snag occur if you reduce the speed to 1000 or below, or use default engrave settings?
Could you check the tension of your belts for me?
When pressing lightly on one side of the belt, the other side should not move. Please check both belts on the left and right side, and the belt underneath your laser arm.
Like this:
(You should see an animated image above)
Let me know if the belt is loose and I will follow up with your next steps.
Nope
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Sorry for the delayed response.
The image you linked to does not show up.
The tension seems perfectly reasonable for a timed belt.
I was able to make the print just fine using 1000 speed (it was also very close to the original total job time too.)
This was also a vector etch, not a bitmap.
On another note, how do I go about getting snap marks enabled on my machine?
You can’t. It was a beta test for a limited number of owners to help with development of future features. That doesn’t mean they won’t change their minds at some point in the future.
@elfguy answered correctly. But don’t want folks to get the impression that the capability is a perk for certain members. Almost all new capabilities go through a beta testing process before being released to all machines. The number of users selected to perform beta testing may vary from just a few, to a hundred or more depending on the company’s need. In the case of Snapmarks the company decided after a period of testing that the capability, for unknown reasons, was not ready for a complete release and that too many resources were needed to make it ready. So beta testing was stopped. A number of machines still have Snapmarks enabled. The company decided not to remove it from those machines, but does not provide any additional support or answer questions. If a machine with Snapmarks fails and needs to be returned the user then loses the capability.
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Good point. Snapmarks required machines with certain characteristics that supported the testing. That doesn’t mean other machines are defective, just easier when developing features to work with known variables. Then you can start working to extend the new features to all machines. I’m pretty sure the camera calibration process came out of the snapmark beta, and more things will follow.
The higher speed engraving doesn’t depend on the camera, but it is still a beta feature. I doubt you’ll see ‘4000’ stay as a max speed, it has pretty much no practical use.
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I apologize for the image not being properly posted, but I appreciate you checking your belt tension anyways!
I’m glad that the tension seems correct, and the same trouble does not occur when utilizing speeds lower than 1000 (or default settings). We’re currently investigating this behavior. Please keep an eye out on our Announcements page for more information in the future here.
In regards to Snapmarks, as @eflyguy correctly answered, we are no longer working on the Snapmarks program, but it did help us create our Camera Recalibration feature to ensure better alignment when printing.
I’ll close this thread for now, but please don’t hesitate to reach out to us in the future if you run into any trouble. We’re here to help!