I have tried to do larger prints on some dark materials (black foamboard and purple poster board). In each case the alignment failed after moving the material forward. I have tried to improve the lighting over top of the case by shining bright white LEDS on the bed, but this doesn’t seem to help. I can understand it would be very difficult to align on black material, but the purple failing surprised me.
Are there any tricks to getting alignment to work in these situations?
Are there any plans to have things like fiducial stickers to help the alignment process in the future?
Thanks for any tips… trying to salvage my purple poster print at the moment!
White low-tack masking would be your best bet, but that would have to be applied before the job started. (Or maybe you could flip the image and turn the purple poster board over for cutting if the backside is white.)
No ideas on how to save the current job though…other than to take a shot at manually aligning it.
Yeah, my current hacky thinking is to do a very light score of parts of the pattern first (this might prove overly complicated), and then apply masking tape over the lines.
No ideas on how to save the current job though…
Somehow I managed to aim my lights just right at the bed to finally get an alignment. Whew. Will do more prep for next time.
I still think some kind of alignment markers would be really handy from GF. (I wasn’t part of the Snapmarks beta, but that seemed pretty cool.)
Yeah, they’re excellent, and will hopefully come out eventually. (They still don’t work too well on dark materials though…the camera needs pretty clear contrast.)
That’d be great. I understand the contrast issue; tough problem. Could be interesting to have something like stickers (which would provide great black/white contrast) with the markers on them.
Also I thought the Snapmarks development was ended in 2019 - Introducing Snapmark (September 2018) - unless I missed some other announcement about something new?
The open Beta ended. AFAIK they are still thinking about it as part of the Premium package. (Haven’t seen it yet though…it might be lower priority. Or they might decide it was too much trouble.
Didn’t think they had killed it outright though.)
I’m so sorry about the snag, but I’m glad to hear that @Jules was able to provide some great advice! This should get you back up and printing for your future projects, so I’ll go ahead and close this thread. However, if you happen to run into any more trouble, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly at support@glowforge.com.