The laser bed camera is all fine and good, but at least currently suffers from some serious alignment and distortion issues (hopefully you’re able to sort out some kind of image alignment/calibration utility down the road).
Please give users the ability to enter X/Y coordinate data (accurate to 3 decimal places) on placed art. This would enable us to make better art and creations with the tool, and may help us to reduce the amount of material that’s wasted due to calibration failures (which require cycling the Glowforge’s power and losing artwork placement in order to recover) and lack of alignment tools (I recall the ability of the Pro model to scan the material and align art being moved on the bed as being a major draw… but it does not currently exist).
Hopefully that’s something that can be done without too much fuss. Thanks!
If you make an SVG that is 20x12” and place your artwork position in the file, it will maintain the placement when imported to your Glowforge.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Personally, I’ve taken to making my SVGs at 19.25x11”, since that’s the area that’s actually printable… then I just move it into place. If I need to engrave and cut as well, I always embed my Engrave images into the SVG.
While numeric positioning would be awesome, the problem is there’s no way to physically register your material to the exact same spot every time (0, 0)… so until there’s a work around for that, numeric positioning does little more than the above approach.
You don’t have to have a 0,0 to take advantage of numeric positioning/scaling/rotation. There are a lot of instances where it can be incredibly helpful outside of that.
How so? Example? Numeric positioning seems superfluous if you can’t guarantee perfect material registration every time. Otherwise, do the 20x12” SVG thing… just load the file and don’t move anything. Everything will load exactly where you want it in the GUI so long as you place it where you need in the file.
I think you’re missing at least 2 of the 3 components that @takitus is mentioning. While I agree with, and design everything in a 20x12 workspace - being able to type in and scale to exactly 50% could be helpful. As could rotate to 30 degrees.
Ah, I see what you mean. I was just thinking of exact positioning (x, y) for registration and alignment. I’ve definitely been wanting scaling and rotation for a while now, heh.
And exact positioning in the 20x12" window, even if that isn’t an exact location on the bed. You still might want to space things at exact distances, etc.
I agree that a reliable 0,0 reference/origin point would go hand-in-hand with numeric positioning, I don’t think it’s a necessary starting point though.
You might want to do something as simple as aligning the tops of two designs. Say you have two logos that you want to engrave onto an iPad - one on the left side, one on the right - and you want the tops of both to be aligned. If you can set the Y coordinate of each image/file to the same value you can be sure that they’ll line-up.
Similarly, let’s say you want one logo to be exactly 50mm below the other one, that would be easy with numeric positioning.
Another situation might be if you engrave a design that was positioned in the GUI visually (that is to say - you placed it without paying attention to its coordinates). Now let’s say you decide you want to cut/engrave a fancy frame around it. With numeric positioning, you could record the position of the already completed engraving and use those coordinates as a basis for the position of the frame.
Again, a reliable 0,0 reference point would definitely be very helpful, but if these scenarios popped up during a single Glowforging session, numeric positioning would make these things easier to do.
I use numeric positioning with my current laser when I’m testing settings.
I might start with a square design that is 25mm on each side. I’ll run the job with one combination of settings and check it out. If I don’t like the results I’ll move the design down 26mm, fiddle with the settings, and run the job again. If I run out of vertical space, I’ll move the design 26mm to the right and Xmm up to start another column.
This gives me a nice, orderly grid of tests that could be saved to be referenced later. (Of course, a non-orderly grid could be saved just the same, but I think orderly looks better.)