I just noticed double sided cutting and continuous autofocus have been removed from the specification page sometime between March and the end of May this year.
Also “ONE BUTTON PRINT” no longer means plugins for Illustrator and Inkscape. It means automatic settings for PG.
Apparently still in the hopper, this is from a post not too long ago.
@dan
"Autofocus is still in its infancy - there’s a lot of future work to do. Right now it takes a single point measurement; multipoint is forthcoming"
Curious about the removal from feature list though. Good catch!
Curiouser and curiouser.
Muilti point is a long way from continuous. I could never see how that could work in real time with the latency and bandwidth of the cloud link when the depth is measured with a video camera.
And double sided always looked very difficult to get accurate enough alignment with cameras.
As soon as I realised these things had not been implemented I feared they never would be.
Not sure what you mean? Admittedly we are out of my direct field, but material ranging seems to be performed by a laser diode/sensor combination in a single window on the bottom of the head. The head camera is a different window. Of course the continuous ranging might be done differently like is done with the newer cell phone cameras. Either way, the least competent engineer on the planet wouldn’t make the mistake of doing that in real time through a perfect network. Only two choices. Do it onboard or preprocess the entire job. I’m betting on the first.
I don’t think the red laser is a sensor. I think the head camera looks where the beam hits the material and works out the height from that. Easy for a single measurement, you just send a snapshot to the cloud and do some image analysis. Much harder to do continuously in real time on an embedded platform with limited resources but also not easy to delegate to the cloud either.
My laser ranging experience is with the big stuff that operates over miles. Not these little sensors, so don’t know. But there seems to be an emitter/sensor combination in the same window. Could be wrong since I’ve never seen one.
That’s exactly what that is.
The removal of the continuous autofocus is still a bit troubling even if they have the hardware available. The other stuff they dropped was all a bridge too far for a v1.0 release, but this is a big feature drop notably absent from any monthly updates.
Isn’t that a laser for distance measuring and an LED light source for taking macro shots with the head camera?
If it is a laser and a photo diode it would need sub pico second resolution to measure distance accurate to 0.1mm using transit time. On the other hand if the laser strikes the surface at an angle the camera just has to look at where the spot is to calculate the distance.
Show me a circuit diagram and I could answer. For all I know it’s Santa’s sleigh. Either way, my original comment stands. They are smarter than to try continuous real time autofocus through an external network.
I think we cleaned up the list a while ago to remove some of the items that were forthcoming but not done yet, but that doesn’t change our intention to do them.
The head photo is a more interesting puzzle though. Someone should start a separate Threat all about that.
GET IT DONE OR ELSE SHAPIRO
We just respond as mind numb zombies here to our overlord 
…it’s Santa’s sleigh
Never thought anyone would’ve guessed on their first try! We managed to find it in a surface mount component to minimize size & weight but we’re paying a premium for that.
You can always tell when I’m doing forum replies on my phone. 
Well that explains why glowforge tries to discourage us from venting out the chimney.
Although he is less forthcoming today, Dan stated here: Will the head camera be used to help with XY registration? that the head camera was used for autofocus. That is why I think it shines the laser spot at an angle to the camera, looks where the spot appears on the masking by averaging to sub pixel resolution and then triangulates to find the distance to material.
Hmm, I wonder how we’ll figure out that they’ve changed their mind on firmware open source since it isn’t in the list to begin with.