Pass through

Has any progress been made on the camera alignment of the passthrough feature? I’m trying a passthrough operation and while I’ve done the alignment jig / registration mark thing before with my CNC router, and could conceive of it working in this case, my workpiece is a scrap of a cardboard box, and therefore does not have a factory straight edge to align to. I suppose I could cut the cardboard with a straight edge?

Glowforge has a strict do not comment policy on feature progress I’m afraid. I’m thinking straight edge.

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Generally you would do a 2-stage jigging process where you cut the straight edge with the laser, remove the jig waste, insert your real material, then turn off the jig lines and do the rest of your work.

It’s been documents a few different ways, we all sort of arrived at similar workflows. Search for “jigging” or “jig” on the forums, there are a number of posts.

Here’s one I wrote:
https://community.glowforge.com/t/alignment-of-irregular-objects-coasters/16116

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Thanks. The issue I was having was that my 30" long piece of cardboard did not have a true straight edge to line up against a straight cut on the jig. I fixed this by using a utility knife and a steel ruler.

I still was getting a little error in X of about 1/32" over my 18" wide part.

I bought a bunch of 4x4 tiles to look at engraving them but as yet they have been most useful in marking precise locations and providing parallel and perpendicular measurement in the prime cutting area. A couple of big 12" x 24" floor tiles also keep everything straight between them.

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Yeah something that long is a challenge, for sure.