Like most, my GF sits near a window. With the way that it sits, light can come in through the window and hit the bed, which is something I haven’t noticed before because the curtains are usually there to block the light. Today, though, the wind has been quite aggressive, blowing the curtains around, much easier to hang them up. When my bed refreshed, I noticed that there is much more light because of the natural light, and it made me wonder why the GF’s LEDs don’t aide the flash when the image is taken.
Imagine the LEDs growing in intensity when the image is taken just briefly, the image would be much brighter. Not entirely a great idea, but would be helpful when I’m engraving my black cardstock
Sure, they’d need a surge in power briefly, which may diminish their lifespan, I don’t know anything about that, but I figured I’d throw it out there. I’m really digging the amount of light in the bed right now. Also, change the stickers on PG materials to matte to help the camera read the code more often. It’s strange, sometimes it’ll read, I’ll open the door to flip a design, then it’ll say unknown material after it takes a new image. Strange.
Also on GF 2.0 put some sort of diffuser over the LEDs, and cover the vital cables running to the lid. I’m always bumping the LEDs when cleaning and am scared I’m going to rip out the ribbon cable for the camera
They don’t even need to fiddle with the light level. They could turn up the brightness by changing how they process exposure. A washed-out, ugly, low-contrast image would be a LOT more useful than an image that is too dark to see. I wish I had one of the pre-release crumb trays that was not painted black.
Now that I think about it… how they process the image brightness doesn’t make a lot of sense. In any old typical camera, when you are on auto exposure, the camera assumes that what it is looking at should be a sort of middle grey, in terms of brightness. So, when you take a picture of snow, it’s grey instead of white. Take a picture of black chipboard, and it’s also kind of grey instead of black. You need to override the camera’s middle-of-the-road auto-exposure starting point to get an image that looks correct, if the subject is very light or dark.
But in our Glowforges, a picture of the black crumb tray comes out BLACK. To me this says they took steps so that image we see so that it is “more correct” in some ways, that is, black things stay black. But this is less useful than a more naive auto-exposure method which would shoot for a middle-grey average. It would be uglier, but would also make things easier to see.
There’s also someone who created “printable” QR codes here in the forum, can’t remember who or what the title was, but they just laser engraved some wood and would drop those in the bed. Loved the idea, just never got around to doing them myself!
When they fine tune settings, the new settings apply to all PG in that category. When you select a material from the pull-down, you don’t enter batch information – if there were different settings for different batches, you’d have to do that.
The QR codes do reference the batch, based on some of my older ones saying “beta,” but they don’t contain settings. They just tell the machine what material it is so it can select that material’s setting.
