Printed Art that isn't there

[rumby]

Hi, I’m new to the Glowforge community, and have been messing around with it for about a week and have done about 20 projects. First time I have had this issue, but Glowforge etched a random circle that is not on my graphics, nor on the setup part of the app where you can setup the steps, etc. Anyone else had that issue?

[dan84]

I’ve seen it before.

There’s a stray node somewhere in your vector design, a node that isn’t fully connected to some path. Tracing bitmaps sometimes generate these disconnected nodes.

The planner turned that stray node into a closed shape by making it a circle. The planner’s output is a movement plan sent to your Glowforge, not anything shown on your computer, so you won’t see the circle on screen, but it’ll be printed, as you saw.

You may find the circle disappears or is a different size when printing the same design, as the behavior of the planner in closing a shape is not deterministic and can depend on things like position and orientation of the design.

The permanent fix is to examine the design in your vector illustration software (Illustrator, Inkscape, etc), find that node and delete it or connect it to the rest of the path. The place the circle printed will tell you approximately where to look – the circle will have touched that node somewhere on its circumference.

Keep an eye out for any doubled up nodes, one hiding behind the other, in that area. It’s not always obvious there’s an extra node there.

[rumby]

thanks. I’ll take a look at the file. I’ve printed the same design 4 times with no circle, and on the 5th the circle was there… so it was odd to me when it appeared out of nowhere. But it’s a computer, so errors happen i guess… Thanks again

[m.smith]

Hi Robert,

My name is Mercedes and I’m part of the Technical team here at Glowforge. That sound’s like a very strange thing to have happened! Would you mind sending me the file you were printing with that created the circle? This way I can review it and see what’s going on.

Thanks,