I bought some mdf off ebay and it’s been great, however its pretty much a crap shoot with consistancy from various suppliers. At least when you get the ballpark settings, it’s not much to tweak it to work. just do a few test cuts to make sure…
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Agree. Although if you get it all from one lot it tends to be quite consistent. But different vendors or new orders from an existing vendor may (likely will) come from different manufacturing lots and need new tweaking.
Just need to be careful to store it in relatively stable humidity levels and avoid getting it wet.
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As I tried to explain to the building manager that took 2 weeks to fix the leaky A/C runoff tray in the offices next to mine that resulted in a sloppy wet mess right where my lasers are located. Maybe I should deduct lost material cost in my next lease payment if I find warp-age…
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Unfortunately I don’t know a good answer. I would have said acrylic but the thickness varies so much that it’s not particularly great.
MDF is one of the least consistent materials I know of - I have some 1/4" that cuts like butter, and some that is uncuttable with my friend’s 100w laser.
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I could see that. I suppose that MDF could be considered the “hot dog” of materials. You know, lips, tongue, eyes. . . . . Throw whatever is left into the mix and glue it together.
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Everything but the squeal!
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There is a very early post from Dan stating this was an original goal, auto-material calibration, but the actual details of implementing it are more complex than it sounds so it was abandoned.
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ya i my described item is a major reason for my purchase. And I was more then a little disappointed to hear it was dropped my hope is it was only de prioritized then again… After that proofgrade was announced and setting up auto awesome would hurt that business model
I believe technology will come to the rescue of this desired feature in the future as new sensors are developed.
unfortunately new sensors means new product and not this product witch originally was advertised as doing so. Iso I am bitter about it and hope they get it working with software at some point and not hardware as they have already decided to go with the cameras and depth finder it should be sufficient adding the intel real sense cameras at this point its to late in the game
I do not believe that this was ever an announced intended feature. Because the entire reason Proofgrade exists is that materials can be visually indistinguishable, but have different cut/engrave parameters required for consistent appearance.
I am sure that Dan may have once said they thought OF that idea, but I doubt they gave it much more consideration than 5 minutes of “Gee, I wish it were possible”
Even with the Scio and other visual spectroscopy solutions, having the machine instantly know what power levels to use for any random material placed inside would be phenomenally difficult.
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Some old inout on the matter:
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That comment was about storing cut parameters uploaded by other users. Not about sensing materials and knowing automatically.
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my comment was not about magically sensing materials it was about having a calibration run and then saving that off and enriching the cloud data with some type of selectable ok this is xyz and submit. And then save it for the world to use if a good description or for your own settings for your library of materials. But that calibration run is what proved to difficult to accomplish so it was abandoned or hopefully just back burner. Hopefully we get a push button calibration template to run on some scrap and we can take the caliper out and do things manually instead of having the camera do the measure. Anyway the small conspiracy part of me as well as lack of anything about materials managment makes me also think things like easy managment bring your own materials are being left out to drive proof grade and for byom we are going to have to have cheer sheets. Again that’s only parinoa due to lack of anything to indicate other wise
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Yeah, the upload and share was scrapped. But save digitally for your own reference is still available (last I saw at least).
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ya that’s unfortunate being the cloud and all the big data analytics are huge. I have a high degree of certainty that would would start to see pattern’s emerge for material settings
@dan is it public knowledge what dimensions the Proofgrade will come in? I’m doing a bunch of designs and knowing this will help determine how i go about these designs. I’ve been assuming the full bed size or 12x20 but confirmation would help. (as a bonus knowing what thickness they are would also help.
)
(ps sorry for reviving an old thread!)
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We haven’t locked down sizes for some critical materials yet because we could charge much less if we decide to cut them a little smaller (because we’d have much less waste). That means more square inches of material in your materials pack, too. If you design for 10x18 you will be fine; TBD where we wind up.
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Could you also sell the waste products with the proofgrade paper on it? That way you could have 2 or 3 sizes of each product offered.
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Oh! That’s a good rule of thumb to know. I’ll go for 10x18 for now. 
Thanks Dan!
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