Pro Passthrough

[mathias]

Hi,

I got the Pro model and I’d like to use the passthrough slot to cut objects that are larger than the bed.
I thought I read somewhere that it should be usable already, but that you needed to align things manually (instead of automatic alignment, which should come in the future).

I sent a ticket to GF a few days ago and they haven’t gotten back to me yet.

When I load an SVG of my object, it gets resized to the bed size.

How can I cut larger objects?
How do I make sure that my objects don’t get resized - I can make it bigger again, but not exactly 100% cause there’s no indicator where that is.
How do I manually align objects so that I get a precise alignment with a following section?
And if the GF staff reads this: When will the automatic alignment be available?

[Jules]

Can’t help with your last question, but there are a couple of tutorials on using the Passthrough as it is now.

Passthrough Alignment Tutorial with Manual Indexing

I wanted to test some theories about pass-through use and to create a tutorial about how we can work around the camera alignment inaccuracies in the current state of the Glowforge software. To spoil the ending, here’s the final product: [final] I’ll be using Adobe Illustrator CC 22.0.1 (current version) primarily because I have a subscription via work. However, I am a total newbie with AI, so please feel free to point out other/better ways to do things if I end up doing them the hard way. I w…

Pro Only - Passthrough Alignment Jig Templates

Okay Bullet Points: (going to demo in Illustrator again, but it should work the same in any drawing program): Everything starts in the file…say I want to cut a 12 inch oval frame Draw a 12 inch high oval in Illustrator and use Offset Path to create a smaller center oval. Cut the ovals exactly in half, using the scissors tool on the side nodes. Make the top two halves one color, and the bottom two halves another color. [PT test c] Group the top two halves together, and the bottom…

How to correctly use the pass through slots

Okay @kyle.miller87, I put some screen shots together that might help. @caribis2 is right about the clipping path - you can delete that, it doesn’t translate into the Glowforge interface. In addition when I broke your file apart, you actually had two instances of the same paths in the file, one with fill color and no stroke, the other with stroke but no fill color. you don’t need both for cutting, all you need is the stroke with no fill colors, so you can delete one of them with the clippi…

[erin]

@mathias

When I load an SVG of my object, it gets resized to the bed size.

Oh, that is really interesting. I haven’t had that happen at all. I have definitely had to resize things in the GFUI so that it will cut, but I’ve never had it resize things automatically. Even if they’re so large that they’re floating away into neverland.

[jbmanning5]

Resizing is most commonly from “Responsive” being checked in the SVG-save dialog, or the SVG not using actual size units (which can happen with some different programs).

As for the passthrough, and setting up designs, at this time you need to trim your designs to fit within the allotted bed size working area. There are different methods of doing this. I have no idea if that’s how it will be in the future, but that’s how it is now.

[jbmanning5]

By the way, the fastest and easiest way I’ve found to split my designs is to use the cutting tools available here… but, they are for Adobe Illustrator only:

Adobe Illustrator plugins — rj-graffix

[Dan_H]

Thank you so much for letting us know about this issue! Thank you for providing those great links to the Passthrough tutorials, @Jules.

Did @jbmanning5’s tip help you with the re-sizing? If anyone else is experiencing this, please reply to this thread.

We’re continuing to develop software for Pro Passthrough. When it’s ready, we’ll announce it here and on https://glowforge.com/latest-improvements/.

I’ll leave this thread open in case you need to follow up!