Rotation a key factor in engrave speed

[evansd2]

This is a well-documented phenomenon. It has to do with all the time you spend accelerating and decelerating, and is especially pronounced on engraves at higher speed.

Previously…

Engraving following the path instead of going back and forth?

One other thing you can do to make your engraves take a little less time: orient the bulk of the engraving in the horizontal direction. That can shave a surprising amount of time for some designs.

Poor toolpaths & cycle time

ROFL! No worries! I can’t get too upset about it…it adds a couple minutes of travel time to each job, but unless you’re running job after job after job…it doesn’t amount to much. A minute or two on a 45 minute job isn’t going to break me. The killer for time taken is engraving, and you can dramatically cut that time down by two things…orient the longest engraves horizontally, to cut down on vertical travel time, and don’t use really high LPI values. Perfect medium engrave coverage is…

Silmarillion escutcheon

That’s a pretty great looking escutcheon! One other tip - I’m not sure what orientation you were using on your screen, but if you rotate the image so that the longest axis of the engraving runs horizontally, you will significantly reduce the time it takes, and can sometimes increase the resolution a little bit. (In other words, it’s better to rotate that top image 90° and print it that way, than it is to leave it the way it is. The orientation won’t matter to the Glowforge software…

Does my Glowforge have a personality?

By a few seconds, yes, since the head has further to go before it starts. (Once it’s there, the print runs just as fast).

Scoring Front and Back

Agree. (And the rotation to put the majority of the engraving along the X-axis works too, to cut down processing time. It’s just an easy alternative that doesn’t involve recoding.) It helps if folks are aware of it though… most folks haven’t had a chance to play with this yet, but I always orient the bulk of the engraving along the X axis if the grain pattern allows it. Call it a free tip in advance of the machine arrival.

Engraving line ordering

Makes sense. Far fewer direction changes in the long horizontal vs the skinny vertical version. And yes I split any wide area engraves into different colors so I can make the laser do them as individual units to prevent long sweeps of the laser on intervening non-resized sections where it’s just wasting time moving between the engraves with the laser off.

Previousliest…?

Tips For the Inexperienced

I just added a tip to the Wiki: I don’t know if this will always be true, but if you have a design that has a lot of engraving, orient the bulk of the engraving in the horizontal direction in the GFUI. I just tried a design that was about height:width of 3:1, and if engraved in a vertical orientation it would have taken 27:15 minutes whereas if rotated 90 degrees the time was 19:36. No other changes. This was a vector engrave. May not be true of raster engraves.

There may be earlier, I dunno.