I’ve been cutting some medium draftboard material. I found it hard to peel the masking tape off after the cut, so I’ve been peeling it off first and then just wiping up with some isopropyl alcohol. However, when I have taken off the masking, the Glowforge seems to be recognizing the material as proofgrade draftboard without the barcode on the material anymore. Is this just a lucky guess or a holdover from my last proofgrade print, or is there something more intelligent going on?
FWIW, it seems the masking is a much bigger pain to peel off the draftboard than it is for the plywoods and hardwoods.
It won’t guess without a barcode so it’s likely a holdover, for whatever reason. I’ve seen it happen occasionally switching between the two.
You can definitely peel it off and then search/enter material type into the Unknown Box on the upper left corner of the print interface. FWIW, the barcodes are supposed to be specific to, I believe, the individual piece of wood (even deeper than lot #, etc.) so the possibility does exist that the inputted settings from manually selecting a PG-material could differ from a scanned barcode (I’m guessing this isn’t the case at this time, but possibly as things mature).
I guess that’s what happened. But why don’t settings stick in the all the files I’ve uploaded? Every one of those reverts to “cut” when I re-open a job I’ve already run.
I guess I’m skeptical that there is much to gain from the difference in 500 zooms versus 501 zooms, which is the resolution of certainty I would expect from external profiling of materials.
Things change. Suppliers change. They might change the formula of the MDF core. They might decide they want a slightly thicker veneer and a slightly thinner core. Who knows. I don’t have a problem with skeptical. I’d imagine that they have a reason for the time, work and money involved with profiling material at a level beyond batch/lot level like they do.
Oh, that makes sense. Like, if someone has some PG Maple lying around for a year, then the default “PG Maple” settings might have changed, but the QR code on the maple would still bring up the correct settings, right?
I would not expect this to be the case. If only because that is a feature they would want to promote! My guess is that the QR code does exactly the same thing as making a choice from the list of PG materials.
That doesn’t seem right. If they know the year old Maple PG will cut better with the old settings, I bet they would use them. And the date of manufacture is undoubtedly encoded in that QR code.
Also, if the QR always brings up the same settings as searching through the unknown materials list, why would there be more info encoded beyond the material type?
I don’t think there is. In the past @dan has said that they are not encoding the settings in the QR code.
As far as I can tell, there is no difference between the results of using a code and making a manual choice from the menu, but I would love to know if there is more to it!
Oh okay. The way I read a post from @jbmanning5 above made me think the settings would be encoded in the QR. If they’re not, then my whole position crumbles lol
The QR code is a somewhat “serial” number identifying the at least the lot and possibly the particular stick. The app looks it up in a database to decide which kind of PG it is. Theoretically they could have specific settings per lot of PG that they use under the covers. I don’t think they do at the moment, but I can’t be sure.
Sorry for the confusion - the QR codes are, as @markwal stated, identifiers for the material and apparently unique (if I remember correctly what @dan said) to each individual sheet.