Specs update

To make things a little more metric :wink:

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Interesting news! None of it is a deal breaker for me.

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Zed’s bigger baby, Zed’s bigger.

Really good news on the extra Z Depth. Will have to adjust all my current plans to match but that is easy tweaking. Can’t wait!

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@Dan that is a very nice compromise. Being able to place a deeper object is so useful, so this really isn’t a bad change at all. As long as the software tells us the working window then this is not a problem at all (I assume it is somewhat similar to how pro video editing works with a “safe zone” in the middle where you are allowed to put content).

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Lousy day to be out of “likes” :slightly_smiling_face:

The 11.5" depth size isn’t a big deal from my perspective. I try to leave a margin on my stuff anyway - just makes me feel better then running a design all the way to the edge and then finding I misaligned the material a hair and I’ve got a defective piece.

The other upside is that most 12x12" Baltic Birch I’ve been getting is only 12" nominally :slightly_smiling_face: Just got bitten by that in laying out a repetitive job where I wanted multiple pieces - just “that” close which lost me a whole row of dinner place “cards” for Thanksgiving. (Couldn’t just scale it because it had slots sized for the birch thickness.)

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I thought that is exactly what @dan meant with his comment from below.

I guess to much a finance guy and too little an engineer as I’m not understanding.

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Thinking it means that the head doesn’t travel any faster, but the more powerful beam enables the material to burn away faster.

That’s what you’re getting with the Pro. Overall time savings to complete a project over a Basic will be plus or minus 20%, because it zaps the material away quicker.

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“Runs about 20% faster” suggests throughput to me not necessarily mechanical speed. I take it to mean if job A takes 10 minutes on a Basic that it would take 8 minutes on a Pro.

They can achieve that in a couple of ways - make the mechanics (head speed) faster, increase the power, increase the Y-axis speed (which can be a complicated mix of physical speed, beam focus/width, etc) or increase uptime (improved cooling) so it pauses less.

My guess is they’re tweaking all of that.

It really doesn’t matter to me if the head travels at 1000 mm/s or 1200 as long as that 10 minute job takes 8, I don’t care about the magic behind it :slightly_smiling_face:

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Perhaps I’m thinking about this wrong, but if the head moves faster, doesn’t that mean that the beam has less time in the material and it was actually cut less?

so to me, the 20% faster only makes sense if it relates to 20% more power in the beam so that a comparable job on the Basic and Pro will have different parameters to achieve the same effect, but the Pro will be 20% faster. (i.e. if the parameters on a Basic are 50% power and 30% speed, the Pro will get the same look by using 50% power and 36% speed)

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Yes. Dan confirmed above that the head on the Pro and Basic mechanically are capable of the same speeds. Faster was used ambiguously. It’s a power/optics improvement with the Pro. The head movement is controlled by the S/W in the cloud so can’t really say how that will translate between the two units.

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Correct.

Throughput is always a balancing act between speed & power settings. For a given job that I might do at 100% power and 10% speed (not uncommon settings for cuts although I don’t exceed 95% power to keep from shortening the tube life) I could run it faster if the power available was greater and get the same effective power delivered to the material.

I almost never have occasion to run a job as fast as the head can move - it’s always power that limits what I can do. So upping the machine’s head speed has little effect on the job throughput - power does.

The Pro tube is 12% more powerful than the Basic 45W vs 40W) and it has improved cooling. When the GF runs hot it pauses and waits to cool down before resuming. The Pro has cooling improvements that should lessen the number or duration of pauses. Both should improve throughput.

Now typically it’s the raster engrave parts of a job that slow the whole thing down - that’s limited by the Y axis speed as the head goes back & forth like an inkjet printer. If the step between “rows” can be larger (say by defocusing the beam a tad so it’s wider) then you get more throughput too because you won’t need as many passes to create the image.

Also, if you can improve the acceleration/deceleration rate on the head (improved stepper motors) you’ll lose less time in head movement during transitions on direction changes.

Lots of variables they can play with. 20% may be conservative :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’m really looking forward to experimenting with the manual speed and power settings down the road… (after I have experimented with a few other things…chuckle!)

Wanna bet we can make the Glowies do things that even @dan and crew never dreamed of? :wink:

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VERY much looking forward to messing around with the settings and seeing what you’ve explained here come to life!

From what you mentioned, do you have a “standard” speed that you run and then you really only change the power at that speed? I can see myself just setting and leaving the speed at say 70% and then only messing with the power to get the cut/engrave/raster/other terms for the laser interacting with the material.

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Just good news in my opinion, more Z depth give us a lot of new materials to try.

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It’s also enough to make some of the tricks like laser slumping of acrylic worthwhile. Simple boxes and trays.

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No from a general approach but yes for different operation/material combinations. I do most engraves at 500mm/s & 35-50% power depending on material. For cuts I’m almost always at 95% power with speeds varying from 10mm/s to 50mm/s again material dependent.

I have basic settings within those ranges for each material I tend to use. I tweak it based on the results of a test run.

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So in theory in a future cloud update with proofgrade material as the laser head slows through the braking zone you could increase power to compensate and make it useable if slower to work in?

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Yes you can (should) adjust the power/speed on the fly. That’s one of the cool things GFs can do.

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That’s not quite what I was angling for there, but It was still a great read. :wink:

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@dan This is exactly the reason to have hard marks on the bed of the laser. Having to no reposition based on software curtains sounds really tedious and kindof goofy. Increased internal space is great, but critical alignment is even harder when the cut area doesn’t match the bed area. PLEASE consider placing hard marks/stops somewhere in the unit for physical guides. Even a simple boundry mark on the side rail would be a good start.

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