I went to cut a piece of draftboard today, and the Glowforge chooses to pull focus on the voided area of the draftboard. For some reason, the focus is nowhere near the cut area. I did the print thinking the autofocus was somewhere in the cut. WRONG!
Another case point for being able to ovveride the default location with a manual point!
The first pic is the out of focus cut next to the infocus one. The second is a photo of the head trying to pull focus into the void.
Tall (>.5") magnets? I use 2 coin magnets, (1.25x.116) when stacked
Look under the gantry, behind the glowforge head. I the fan bumps anything, may as well cancel the print, as the location is lost.
My procedure if I bump gantry or head (putting material in, advancing through the passthrough, etc), TURN IT OFF, Start again, machine is lost and will carry the incremental shift (bump) thinking everything is fine. Re-calibrate from cold start.
Your photo shows a little smokey glowforge lid…
If GFUI cannot read barcode (QR) clearly, focus will be compromised, periodic cleanup may me necessary. Refer to manual.
The updated manual has cleanup procedures. Search the forum, there is a great video showing cleanup.
I think the issue here is that the scanning procedure (where the head moves over the material to determine the material height/distance to material and subsequently set the auto focus value) moved to an area that had previously been cut, which would give an incorrect auto focus value.
The Proofgrade QR code will set the material height, which will set the focal height. But, the scanning procedure before a print takes a reading/makes a calculation with the red dot, which sets the beam focus (a little more complex than this, but that’s in a nutshell)
I’ve had the red laser miss my material altogether and it had no visible impact on the result. After that happened, I ignored the red laser.
This is not a magnet collision issue. They are well out of the path of the laser head and they do make clearance on the medium draftboard anyway.
Yup, and it did it twice, I had to reset the material so it would check an uncut location.
Were there elements either in the UI that were ignored, or layers hidden in the file that maybe fell outside of your cut area?
Yes. I think they were set to ignore the other elements.
That might be an interesting test (my Glowforge is loaded right now waiting on material to dry)…
Also, I would have to test this, but I believe Save As (for Illustrator) exports all of the document (hidden layers and all) and then sets the hidden layers in the SVG to not visible. Whereas Export for Screen only exports what’s currently active in the document.
But - the file handling would be interesting to test…
Either way, it should only pull a focal height from an area within the active cut and/or engrave area. Anywhere else (either from an ignored element or a hidden SVG element) I would consider a bug.
Thanks for letting us know about this, and I’m sorry for the unexpected results. The photos are very helpful, so thanks for sharing those as well. I’ve passed this report on to the team and we’re looking into it. I’m sorry that I don’t have any further details right now.
I’m not sure if a change in software has made it worse. I’ve had 2 other very similar focus issues today. My last print around 10:45 was another focus fail.
and the print at 11:01 was also a focus fail.
Thanks for letting us know, and I’m sorry you’re still running into trouble. We’re seeing this too, and we’re looking into it.
I’m going to close this topic. If you have any other questions, please start a new topic or email us at support@glowforge.com.
