I guess my question revolves partially around what defines a laser “session”?..
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Please remember that many of our booth staff are new employees, and from all different departments of the company. You may have been asking software functionality questions of someone in accounting or logistics. The best place to come for definitive answers is here.
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It’s a great policy that everyone gets to attend the shows, by the way. Both for the customer, and I’m sure even more so for the company, with the whole staff getting to see the public interact with the Glowforge. Kudos on that!
Would you be willing to clarify the question at hand? Let me refer to another example, when you were kind enough to laser an a’mond (as they are pronounced here in nut-town, Chico! Why? Because we shake the 'ell out 'em… Sorry, that joke gets infrequent use):
If I wanted to engrave the Glowforge logo on 15 almonds how would I do this assuming that the almonds are slightly irregular and I would like to adjust either the almond or the path to be lasered for each almond?
Would this require doing each almond individually, as a discrete cycle of the Glowforge workflow?
If not, what are the options for batching the lasering of the 15 almonds? Thanks for any insight!
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Make yourself a jig of oval holes slightly smaller than your average almond in a piece of 1/8" acrylic. Then use that cutout template in your design software to place your text or whatever. Change the cutout template lines to not cut and your almonds will be lined up appropriately.
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And don’t eat the almonds unless you are lasering the shell. (Apparently they taste pretty bad once they’ve been lasered.)
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We have friends with amond orchards in Capay Valley. They tell us that joke at least once every time we go out there. It makes more sense when you are actually shaking an almond tree to get the nuts to fall.
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Sometimes it is easier to lay down a grid of marks and then position your parts (or almonds) on top.
That is what I did when experimenting with making beads and it worked well.
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Anybody else taste the irony of this response?
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Either on the shell or the nut itself can be done with the suggestions that were given. Whether it would be more work to just do 15 separate nuts or make a jig is up to you. As to just marking a grid and placing them down, that probably won’t help you since the nuts are rounded on both sides and will wobble around at the slightest perturbation. If you ever plan on doing more almonds or perhaps other small parts (beads?), a jig engraved into wood or acrylic might be best, even if it is not faster than just doing 15 a’monds. - Rich
Don’t know why that was aimed at @Jules…
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I make a good target. 
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@Jules @jamesdhatch @jbv @jkopel @thomas.alessi.jr @chrgeup
Thank you all for your responses. What I am asking is a little more abstracted than holding the items in place physically (e.g. with a jig). The almonds were merely an example, but the real question is what defines a cycle/session for the Glowforge?
If I have more than one item on the bed at once how does optical alignment work for that?
Can I drag as many images as I want onto the workspace and send them as one session? Or is each session one image?
If each session is one image, can I make one big image and then view that image superimposed on the bed while I physically adjust each object to line up with my laser image?
Either way, the alignment is eyeballed.
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Wasn’t this already answered? - Rich
You can only work with one image at a time, if I understand correctly, but that image can certainly contain multiple parts.
So if you wanted to laser a logo on a dozen almonds at once, you would have to do two things:
- Create a jig that would hold the almonds at a precise spacing for lasering.
- Create a single image with multiple logos on it at that same spacing
Then you could align the single image over the multiple almonds and hit the big button to start the lasering.
Pretty sure that would be how it would have to be done.
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From how I understand what GF will be capable of, there are multiple ways of doing this.
- You have your 15 objects randomly on the bed, take an image of the bed, and then manually move each small “image” onto each object. (I don’t know if the GF can rotate the image to match the orientation of the object)
- You can create a single image composed of 15 “parts”. You can put the objects onto the bed and then take a picture, drag the image onto the picture and then attempt to adjust each object as necessary, take another picture, line up the image, etc… until you have a picture from the bed that matches the image that you had previously created. (This method would be GREATLY enhanced by a jig or template to place the objects on.)
- You can probably come up with another clever way of doing this.
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This is the crux of the whole matter. These are not uniform shapes, and there cannot be precision. I would want to adjust for the minute difference in each object.
Is this going to be possible? (I had the idea that we could only work with one image at a time for placement?)
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probably not how you’re thinking.
I’m talking about a very clunky way of doing this. There is nothing saying that once we take a picture of the bed we HAVE to print.
- take a picture of the bed
- go into the software and take your image and see if it lines up (it won’t the first time)
- make note of the “adjustments” needed to the objects on the bed
- move objects on the bed as best as you can
- repeat steps 1-4 until the picture of the bed and the image seems to “line up”
VERY crude way of doing it, but I think it would work if nothing else will.
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You get me! My hope is that we could have a superimposed + live view of the bed to avoid the retaking of pictures.
This is exactly my question!
ohhh, you’re thinking of a “LIVE” view of the bed and have the ability to drag your image into the software and see where you would need to move the objects. THAT would be great, but I’m not sure that would be in the cards, @dan? Hopper? Does it already exist?
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Exactly! And this is only if we can only work with one “image” at a time. If we can work with multiple images per session, then that works too!