Short tips and tricks

This is big.

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Sorry to lead you all astray. It wasnā€™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 Iā€™m going to make myself a collection of :proofgrade: business cards for all of the material types I currently have. :smiley:

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Or you can just pick them from the pull-down listā€¦

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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 donā€™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 etcā€¦

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. Iā€™ve been building a collection of printed QR codes to throw on the bed when using scraps ā€“ itā€™s a huge timesaver. :sunglasses:

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I hadnā€™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. Iā€™ve cut from both sides (in part to preserve the QR code for later) ā€“ it really doesnā€™t make difference.

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That gave me an idea:

I read the QR code data as text using a scanning app (ā€œGlowforge:B:AMAABzEā€). 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 shouldnā€™t be any issue with it flying off.

Two short tips I discovered while making this:

  1. All those tiny squares to weed! I learned that Gorilla tape is wonderful for that.
  2. Ever since I have been using my Glowforge, I noticed smoke odor coming from it, and thought oh well, thatā€™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. Thereā€™s a search bar, just type in ā€œmapleā€ 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. Iā€™m just playing around so far, figuring out how stuff works.

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Cool! Wasnā€™t sure youā€™d seen it yet. :slightly_smiling_face:

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You donā€™t need to weed them. It works regardless. Also, a Cricut scraper or even a credit card edge will push the tape off the squares. Cheaper than Gorilla tape :slight_smile:

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This is a great idea!

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Go one step further and create QR code for non PG materials settings (based on what you determined worked well) - will the GFUI read that and automatically invoke the settings? :sunglasses:

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I wish. I bet the QR code data just encodes some material/batch data that is hardcoded somewhere.

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