Second anodized aluminum tag - whoa - max quality

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So my wife returned tonight and I figured let’s repeat the tag at max 1300+lpi res. OK, first off engraving time went to like 3.5 minutes from 17 seconds… but more importantly got the wife to do it (before her asthma made her leave from the other lasing going on this evening.

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Now first off how good is max lpi?

flawless. Just amazing. There is no detectable alias on any line.

I might use a slightly lighter font in the future, but she loves it as is. Now she’s wondering if they want to offer customized ones at her hospital with their logo/number on them…

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Now, the slightly not so good is the alignment. And before all you guys say “hey we told you to do a box”, that’s not the problem here.

It’s camera vs. reality.

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Purple is the projected location from the GFUI, while white is the actual engrave showing through… (sorry about the blur, that’s my fuzzy camera, still waiting on @rita for a solution), but that is a huge offset. Now, unlike the last one, it is much farther off center, but it is a problem if we can only center things currently when they are bed-centered.

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The quality looks great. Glad there are a bunch of pre-release units out there to catch issues like this alignment problem.

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I can clearly see that your text is aligned on the screen. I am sure the gf folks can fix it. :slight_smile:

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Is this something that putting the material height will impact?

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Ditto on putting in the exact material height on non Proofgrade. It makes a big difference in placement of a design over a piece. And put the piece right under the lid camera, as it looks like you did.

And your lid camera image is fuzzy? That’s not good.

And max lpi is pretty good there!

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The material on the Laserbits site is listed as 0.040" which I entered.

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fixed, with @Rita. Just needed a manual focus. Just didn’t want to do anything until they were ready in case they needed me to try and hunt down a cause.

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Sorry you are struggling with the alignment, but damn that quality looks amazing!
I am really looking forward to doing multi color anodizing this way.

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Calipers are your friend :slight_smile:

My wood supplier tells me 1 1/2" is 2 :smile:

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Checked the photo again and it looks like the tag is off to the left of the bed. For small pieces if you center the piece right under the lid camera, you will have a better chance of centering an image accurately without a jig. Off to the sides, it tends to less accuracy.

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I’m sure the thickness you used was perfect. But I must agree in the strongest terms about digital calipers.

Everybody, and I mean every single Glowforge user that intends to use non Proofgrade material should go out a purchase an inexpensive digital caliper.

Even helps with Proofgrade in certain situations. The manual material height and focus entry needs to be very precise to get good results.

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I own many sets, since I do 3D printing, CNC machining, etc… But normally machined metal parts are pretty close. I will go check.

Yeah, the first time I did it direct center, this time halfway to the side. Likely camera distortion, but that’s why we test…

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Not only that, but eyeballing something is never going to give you the max precision.

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Few things:

  1. Unfortunately, the thickness you enter can’t be very precise, because the bed height varies (small variations) and such. The only way to get a perfectly accurate measurement is using autofocus.
  2. The offset problem is worse on some machines, not others - again, relates to factory calibration, among other things. We’re replacing both calibration and code, which creates a dramatic improvement.
  3. Yeah, 1335 LPI is amazing!!!
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So happy to see your item 2 here! I think that will be the last piece of the puzzle for me.

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This might be part of it. Camera calibrations can change a fair bit with focus, so the factory calibration is likely shot now.

Along those lines… @dan it would be cool to be able to drop a small optical target on the back of the laser head and re-calibrate the bed camera. I do this with a CMM at work, I can’t think why the same techniques wouldn’t apply. Probably sitting pretty close to the bottom of the hopper from a user perspective, but could pay off the engineering time pretty quickly if it saves you mailing units back to GFHQ.

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This was WAAAAY out of tune, like over a half-turn of the focus ring, so I am suspecting either some missing glue or some very vigorous handling by FedEx…

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Just place one of these under the camera and choose calibrate camera.

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If the camera ever goes out of focus, that’s an assembly error (as was the case here). We’ve added QA steps so it won’t happen in the future.

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