Starting up Question

So, when I first start the glowforge, should it be empty? I notice the head zooms around doing fancy glowforge things when it first starts, and i’ve tended to leave whatever proofgrade material in it. I wonder if it’s screwing up some alignment though?

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I often have stuff in it when I reboot (my PRU is sometimes wonky and needs a reboot after a purple button and I don’t unload the contents)

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Me too, but, is that wrong? lol

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Unlike a 3D printer it does not use the bed/tray to zero. It used the logo on the head. It’s ignores the bed for startup.

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Henry nailed it — unless you’ve placed something on the bed that would physically impinge on the moving head (especially the air assist shroud), you are good to go.

Have you seen this video from @dan?

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Ummm…not sure if that’s definitive (the head part not the zero-zero). I used to leave my founders ruler in the bed up against the left side. It made for a nice alignment edge because the material would then be inside the cut area on the side.

I noticed the head would do a long long freaky dance and never home if I left the ruler engrave side up. The head seemed to be centering over the GF logo on the ruler. Took it out and flipped it over and didn’t have another issue since.

I reported it so I don’t know whether that was the real problem or if it’s a coincidence or if they fixed some software issue.

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Oh, I’d totally believe it got confused finding 2 GF logos in the box (it is somewhat surprising there isn’t a basic limit switch kind of thing to get it in the zone…

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Displaying two GF logos to the camera - careful, your machine will pull a HAL 9000 on you.
“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that”.

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It’s OK to leave material in the bed, although we just discovered a rare bug where a certain shape of cutout confused the head-finder. But that’s one in many thousands of examples.

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Was that the Glowforge logo? :slight_smile:

Weirdly no - just a big rectangle.

The first step of head homing locates the head anywhere, and usually can’t see the logo. That gets coarse positioning correct so it’s under the camera and we can see the logo. Then it uses the logo for micro positioning from there.

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