Lots of tiny circles confuses printer

I was making a earring holder for my daughter from a piece of acrylic. But every time I tried to cut it it would move to the first circle and stop and the printer kept acting as if it was printing. I thought maybe there were to many and it over loaded the system. I went back to illustrator and made half of them a different color and tried printing one section while ignoring the rest. Still no luck. Then I tried three groups and still the same problem. I gave up for the night after turning it off an on and reloading the browser each time. The next day I tried reducing the export precision from 3 decimal places to 1, and that did the trick.

Just wanted to post it somewhere to help the next person. :slight_smile:

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I found a problem engraving a big array of circles… The print head would sometimes speed up and engrage some of the circles really fast, meaning they didn’t cut through.

After a lot of fiddling around I determined there was nothing wrong with the file, because the misbehaving circles would change between sessions. I am confident that I found a bug in the Glowforge software and maybe you found a cousin.

@dan did verify the weirdness of my findings and forwaded the info to his engineers, so hopefully this will be fixed eventually.

Post your file if you are willing and we can see if we see the same problem.

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I’m glad you shared your solution. I’ll have to give it a try on some paper this weekend when I get some time and see if that alleviates the randomization I encountered when I tried to do a bunch of circles. I’m not thrilled about the prospects of having to reduce precision to tenths of an inch to alleviate the problem.

Probably related to the cousin I found a few months back:

Complete randomization of nothing more than a large array of 0.25" circles in a grid.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BeKcBYEl-Fm/

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Here is the file that failed.

earring%20holder

The top three bases were cut from 5mm non-pg wood. The lower large circle was a piece of scrap acrylic from a sign display.

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Thanks for posting your solution @bwente We appreciate your initiative to help others here!