Sorry for the venting, but it has been extremely difficult to use my GlowForge consistently for my scientific projects. I have a well-defined set of parameters, but they simply stop working after your updates, even if you do not mention changes in the printing settings on your released update note. I have to keep changing my parameters every now and then to get back where I were months ago, it is time consuming and exhausting! If you consistently refuse to use actual units or describe how you calculate your power/speed, at least give us the option to keep a consistent setting throughout your updates. I am not trying to create market items that can have slight variations on it, I am trying to do serious science.
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The forum is populated by other users/owners and not regularly visited by Glowforge personnel. Your complaint should probably be submitted to Support.
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Thank you for your suggestion, dklgood!
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Out of curiosity, why do you think they are changing something without telling us? Is it possible your materials or machine performance change causing your variation? There would be no reason for Glowforge to make universal changes without informing their users.
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Hi!
It is not unusual. My processes have very little room for variability. I use the same material, from the same batch, at the same temperature.
It is a very well established process that I used over months with consistency. Then, out of a sudden, an update comes and my samples become highly inconsistent.
They already do not share information on power, speed and other important parameters. So it is pretty conceivable for me that they did change it, perhaps to improve the quality of other prints using the proof grade materials…
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But why wouldn’t they announce an improvement/.change? When updates are pushed to machines there is a process. Why wouldn’t other people notice changes? Yours can’t be the only special use machine.
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To be fare, I do think that one of the updates to improve speed, a few people complained that their saved custom settings were changed. I didn’t pay too much attention to the details of that, but in that particular update, I think people could write support to restore their saved settings? I could be entirely wrong though, since I’m guilty of just skimming through the posts.
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There are announced changes, and that one was months ago. I don’t think, however, that system wide changes are imposed without notification. If that were to happen there would be many people that notice the change and they would be all over Facebook.
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That’s true. It was an announced change. I was just thinking that the saved settings changing wasn’t an announcement, just an unintended result of the update.
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You do know that the machine itself can vary quite a lot fdepending on random factors. As smoke or fumes is drifting by a window when the laser fires,.even that little bit will lower the power that reaches the material. However, if it is close enough to a window, it will burn itself on to the window and lower the power at that moment untill it is cleaned off. It might look like buildup over time, but each case is eposodic and slightly different.
I have seen the case where one cut had a larger than average such event and it made a difference I could see. I looked at the windows where the most build up occurs and they looked fine, but a zeiss wipe showed some brown as I cleaned the “looked fine” window and the issue did not show on the next cut.
You can repeat a location the machine fires at to a second decimal point, but unless you are repeating a locked down location on the crumb tray you cannot place ithe material that accurately, and being within 5 degrees of rotation is harder still.
There is no commercially sold CO2 laser that will not have the same issues. If you had been here since the beginning you would know the subtulties that have been “fixed” that even turning a corner takes a lot of deliberate variation to keep from burning an extra hole there. I have noticed that there is a ballpark they have reached, but in extreme circumstances there is a difference that can be seen.
There was a fairly big step up in overall speed that they rolled out a few months ago that I might need to retest some species of wood that took special settings, but they have done this rarely and any general change like that will get many replies.
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