Perfect Alignment Every Time - The Fiducial Alignment Ruler (design in post)

I haven’t even attempted to use the calibration program because I like snapmarks so much. This is exactly what I need to do accurate work.

I’m glad it’s working well for you too!

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I still think snapmarks should make a comeback. Its almost essential for any work I do without the crumb tray in. Especially for doing my dice. It would be near impossible to flip and align the dice each time using the camera alone and the snapmarks make it so I can just have the art auto align to my jig

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Oh I do too. Theyre too awesome to downplay like that

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Yes, real precision and real registration marks that can be printed elsewhere and used in the glowforge are an essential tool, and it shocks me that they’re seemingly considering not making them available generally.

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thanks a million!!!

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Here is an SVG version with some minor changes:

fiducial ruler v2.1.svg.zip (15.7 KB)

Layers from top to bottom are: engrave, score, score, cut, cut.

I based this on the PDF from @lazlo666 because Corel Draw imported the original AI file like this:

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It would be really nice if this got tagged somehow to let people know at the start that SnapMarks is a discontinued feature so they don’t spend a long time reading nearly all of the 320 posts before finding out that this isn’t available to them. I was so hopeful but now crestfallen.
But, really awesome job of suggesting this tool 2 years before they made it possible and then putting together a valuable jig. I’m not sure how the camera recalibration is any sort of substitute for SnapMarks.

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The good news is that Snapmarks might be released widely later as a Premium Feature. The bad news is…no one knows when it will be available…it is still in Beta. If you have it available on your machine as a tester, it will be under the 3 dots icon.

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I agree. I think the head based camera should be utilized to the fullest extent, as it provides much more accuracy than the lid camera will ever be able to.

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I guess I got lucky, and thanks to @jules guidance on where to look, because I DO have SnapMarks. And, wow, they work great! All the reading of this thread was worthwhile :slight_smile:
I’ve got some magnets now so will cut my first jig. I’ll post the file when done as I’ve added @dan’s pressfit ring to the design.

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So, seems like the snap mark feature is no longer available. Is there another way to do this?

Using GF Aura

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There are several ways but for today I’ll tell you the simplest way.
Place your item as close to the middle as you can. Now invoke a focus from the menu. After it is focused on the object is is possible (assuming everything is working right) to zoom way in and manually place your artwork.

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Hopefully they will reevaluate that, as I think many have reignited that flame with Emily coming on to The team. I was one of the lucky ones and use Snapmarls for a number of different things, but coasters and cutting boards and bottle openers with perfect alignment is pretty nice. I never post any of my snap marks projects, as I don’t want to look like I’m rubbing it in for those who don’t have it. I’ll see what I can do to poke the bear a little bit and discuss if this is a possibility for the future.

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yeah, i have it from the early testing days as well. and while i don’t use it a lot, it’s flipping awesome to have when those moments it’s useful for crop up. it’s fantastic for removable (but not disposable) jigs. i had to use a jig to engrave 130 two-inch wood cubes. it was nice to have the snapmarks on the jig so i was able to pause all that production and remove the jig to do other things. then just put it back and align to snapmarks and continue on with the big job.

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Snap marks was the only thing that gave me the confidence of reliable, consistent output when attempting to properly align things with the glowforge.

I’m really surprised they havent done more with the head cam to increase reliable placing of designs. Aligning to the head of the machine is really the only way to know you will be getting accurate results.

Would love to see them revive snap marks and give everyone better quality output

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IIRC, they only tried testing on certain machines that they knew were able to do it well based on their logs (or something like that). it was part of the testing that led to implementing the passthrough software. not sure what the issue was with other machines. i can’t imagine they wouldn’t have implemented it, even as a premium feature, if it would work on all machines well.

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Yeah they never went into details WHY it wouldn’t work, but if they did it would have probably uncovered hardware faults where they didn’t want to deal with the return/exchange process of those units.

Happy that I was one of the people that had access to this, but it should have been possible on every machine.

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i feel like they kinda implied that not every machine would be able to do it properly. but i don’t think they outright said that. and yeah, i’m sure there would be even more unhappy people who got it and it didn’t work than where we are now, where only a few got to test it and it wasn’t rolled out officially.

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I’d be tickled pink if someone is more pull than I get them to do this, snap marks isn’t for every project but when it’s usable, it’s great.

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Here’s to hoping! :crossed_fingers:

I’d volunteer to be a “it’s fine with me if my machine can’t do it, but can I at least TRY it” tester. I have been wanting to give it a go for years and if it isn’t great for me, I’m no worse off. :wink:

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