Pretty sure that is opposite what @dan has told us in the past (while I do have material drop in my PRU the counter to your advice is any slight warp over the entire sheet is reduced when the smaller object drops flat onto the honeycomb.
Understood. I purposely used the words “In general” because I’m sure there will be cases when going the other way makes sense. Haven’t run across such a condition myself but I do remember your post about it. The number of times that I have ruined a design by cutting before engraving is many.
Dan’s original advice to do cuts before engraves seems to be temporary advice for the Pre-Release units. The reason given at the time was something about causing the cuts to lose power after a long engrave. For the later Pre-Release and for all Production units the tube issue has been addressed. But I could be wrong. Just going with what is standard laser 101 for all other laser cutters.
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No preference on the recommendation any more - there used to be an issue where cuts worked best at the start. That’s gone, so do what works best for you.
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Edited my tip about a delay between the user interface saying Press the Print Button and the Print Button flashing. Production units are not currently reporting the delay So it may have been addressed in either the Firmware or user interface for all Production units.
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This is big.
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Sorry to lead you all astray. It wasn’t Dan. It was @cynd11 who discovered this gem. Giving credit where credit is due!
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Might be useful for folks to understand that Wifi connectivity AND successful handshaking with offsite servers is necessary before calibration begins, or any other indication of life beyond the LEDs and fans. Added the following to my Tips list:
The GF unit does very little that you would notice without a successful handshake through Wifi. Head Calibration is the first visible operation after power on, but it will not even begin calibration if there is no communication back to the GF servers through Wifi.
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Rick you should Wikify it so you can keep adding to it after a week or so. (It will lock after that.)
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Proofgrade Label Hack
I stumbled across a neat little trick today when I was about to cut some acrylic and wanted to cut over the proofgrade sticker because that was the best place to put my design. This is always a little annoying for me because you have to manually select the material going forward once you do that. Or do you?
I took out my iPhone, snapped a picture of the sticker and printed it out on a standard piece of copy paper. I tucked that under the thick clear acrylic that I was cutting, and closed the lid to see what would happen.
Eureka! The Glowforge read it just fine. I think I’m going to make myself a collection of 
business cards for all of the material types I currently have. 
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Or you can just pick them from the pull-down list…
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You totally can but I find something about the act of using the physical card with the material satisfying. I admit that I don’t know exactly why but I was amused by it.
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ya this was my plan given how bad the focus issues have been . as well as once you need the section of material where the label is etc…
This has come up other places but bears repeating here.
Rare earth magnets are great for holding down light items that would blow about otherwise as well as pulling slight warp out of wood long enough to cut it.
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As @mark said, you can do this, but it can be pretty annoying if when you have a partial piece of PG without the QR code. Every time you lift the lid to re-position/flip an item or load a new design, the ID will fail, forcing you to re-select the material again. I’ve been building a collection of printed QR codes to throw on the bed when using scraps – it’s a huge timesaver. 
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I hadn’t though about this but until we get invisible QR coding this means proof grade has a definite top and bottom?
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Definite, no. Easier, yes. I’ve cut from both sides (in part to preserve the QR code for later) – it really doesn’t make difference.
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That gave me an idea:
I read the QR code data as text using a scanning app (“Glowforge:B:AMAABzE”). I entered that into an online QR code generator to get a clean JPEG, and threw in a cut line and some text and cut it out of, appropriately enough, medium maple plywood. It works, and there shouldn’t be any issue with it flying off.
Two short tips I discovered while making this:
- All those tiny squares to weed! I learned that Gorilla tape is wonderful for that.
- Ever since I have been using my Glowforge, I noticed smoke odor coming from it, and thought oh well, that’s just residual odor and/or smoke coming back in through the window. Nope! Make sure your exhaust hose is well attached, mine had a gap at the bottom.
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@jsc you can also click on the Unknown Material words at the top of the lefthand column, and it will give you a drop-down that will load any settings for the Proofgrade materials. There’s a search bar, just type in “maple” and it pulls up all the choices.
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I know, and eventually with a lot of Proofgrade materials, a search in a drop down will be far easier than a physical search through a pile of QR code tokens. I’m just playing around so far, figuring out how stuff works.
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Cool! Wasn’t sure you’d seen it yet. 
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