Print stopped!

HI. I have been trying to print some living hinge or flexible kerfs for two days now and it is going incredibly slowly.

Typically, I upload about 5 samples in one SVG and after positioning and hitting Print, I get about 15 minutes of wait, and then I get: PRINT STOPPED Unable to complete the print. Below I get: “An error occurred on your Glowforge. Please refresh your browser before printing. It may also help to turn your Glowforge off and on again.”

I’ve tried all that and I still can’t print. I have printed one set, after getting errors, but this second step is making me old, 15 minutes at a time!! Any ideas? I have screen shots of the messages, and the SVG file included.

Thanks!

mz

swatch2

I’m pretty sure those are the same free files i downloaded and they are very poorly setup. each individual line and change in direction is its own stroke which is why it it is failing on you. If you really want to try these i suggest trying one at a time or finding some other ones to play with.

You can also go in and edit the file but it can get a bit complicated and frustrating as even trying to move these things around in inkscape can brick the program at times.

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I’m going to second that suggestion…I downloaded those too, couple of years back, and after examining the files, realized they were complete junk from a lasering standpoint. Never used them as a result.

They would take a heck of a lot of work to make them workable, but I think you’re going to need to clean them up if you want to use them. Or just print one at a time.

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I need to find a good way to have the line segments joined up instead of all these segments. I have OmniGraffle, which can open most SVG files, but not these. I am trying out the trial of Affinity Designer, but it is really slow handling all of these line segments. Are there any other tools that can join up touching segments and make them into a line?

Of course I could just create the basic shape for each myself, and then opt and paste them in place. But I wanted a quick swatch to see which patterns I liked and only concentrate on those.

I looked at it in Illustrator, and it was more than I wanted to tackle. (Although honestly, I can’t remember why it was an issue now…that was a couple years ago. Unjoined segments wouldn’t have been enough to deter me, so it must have been messy with duplicates as well.)

I can save you a little bit of time and material…if you are wanting to create a living hinge, just use the straight lines. They are the strongest and most flexible. The other patterns look really cool, but they do not hold up as well as the plain straight line segments. And when you are building something, you don’t want it coming apart on you after a few flexes.

Thank you, that’s helpful to know. I am not needing a hinge, just to make a curve and then it stays put. I would love to be able to incorporate a design into the curved area that is in character with the rest of the round box I am making.

So far, I definitely know that Diamond is too fragile for just plane handling, let alone frequent bending.

I might have tried the bowling pins…it looks familiar, and it wasn’t terribly stable either. They might work for a gentle curve, but round might be problematic.

Just make sure you have the correct diameter calculated for the hinge if you go with one of the decorative ones. They don’t handle “extension” well at all.

Yeah, that’s the hard part. 2πr is easy enough to calculate, but making sure that the dimensions in Affinity Designer print at the right scale is my worry. Trial and error is probably the way i’ll do it.

I went through in Inkscape and selected each individual hinge and combined - that stopped Inkscape from crashing at least :slight_smile:
I then moved each individual into its own file and have used them in the :glowforge: no problem since then

Thanks for the help with this, everyone! I’m sorry you ran into trouble printing those files. It does appear that the issue is based in the file’s construction. I checked out the file in Illustrator, and it looks like it contains a very high number of individual nodes (in excess of 80,000). Unfortunately, this image is too complex to be processed. This occurs very rarely, and it usually happens when a file is converted from another format. For example, it can occur if a raster file is converted to vector format with the precision set too high.

The best way to solve this depends on your design. You may be able to simplify the design with your design software (it sounds like the community is already underway helping with that). Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape both have options to simplify paths. If you converted your image from another source, you might be able to perform the conversion again. In any case, your design will most likely print successfully if it has fewer nodes (also called anchor points).

I’m going to move this thread to the Everything Else section of your forum so the discussion can continue there.

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I’m glad to know that it wasn’t the GlowForge, though on one of the prints I had some crooked lines issues, but I am willing to chalk that up to the same issue.

The original files were DXF files which I exported to SVG in Inkscape. (Inkscape sucks royally in many ways, including making my Mac look like some unholy OS, and not supporting standard Mac command keys) Inkscape wasn’t happy with these files either, crashing a few times and also not displaying anything for some of the files.

Once I had the SVGs in Affinity Designer, I thought I was home free. But I guess not. So does Affinity Designer have a way to connect these paths into simpler ones?

I definitely am trying to keep Adobe products off of my Macs since between the Installer app that requires a case insensitive file system, and the constant requests for activation every time I update OS, I’d rather give my money to upstarts so that we have more choices. Right now my two main choices are OmniGraffle, for vector based stuff and Pixelmator and Sketch for other. I’m trialing Affinity Designer, and am open to other suggestions. (Mac apps please; Cross platform has not proven to be a plus)

I’m also interested in ways to do some programmatic or math based drawing. For example, drowning a circle with x^2 + y^2 = r^2. I thought GraphoingCalulator might do it, but it doesn’t output vectors, just bitmaps.

Thank you!

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