Very cool @takitus!
Out of curiosity, how would you have expected this to work to be easier (the thing you describe as ‘numeric positioning’)? Even when I had other lasers that had steerable lasers, numeric offsets, settable 0,0 points, and all that, your approach is more or less how I would do this.
Thanks! If I had a physical 0,0 point I could just shove the piece of wood in the corner, and wouldn’t have to have cut the jig at all.
Out of sheer idiocy/experimentation, I decided to remove the bed and jig about half way through cutting all of the invites to see if I would have any issues getting everything back to where it needed to be.
I did… and it was quite troublesome to get them back to a usable position. The one saving grace was the magnet holes being present in the design, which I was able to use as a key of sorts to realign everything to. I put down some scrap material, recut the magnet holes into it, put the magnets in, and then pulled the scrap material off and laid the jig back over the freshly placed magnets. It still wasn’t as square as it was originally, but was close enough to get by.
This was actually a cool little discovery in making alignments in a system like this, which I will probably use every time I have to cut a jig until/if a 0,0 and numeric positioning are put in.
Thanks for sharing your process for these!
I just did some engraving on the laserbits walnut ply, there wasn’t a lot of contrast with how dark the wood is. Next time I think I might spray paint the engraving a lighter color before removing the masking I bet that would look great on these invites too! Ya know if your friends want to add another step before removing the masking 
You’re welcome! Ha we discussed that when I made the original samples for them to check out. They really liked the walnut, but agreed that it was hard to read. The maple on the other hand was very easy to read but rather bland, so they decided on cherry as the main wood. They wanted to keep some diversity however, so they bought a large quantity of cherry, a medium amount of maple, and a small amount of walnut. We joked that we would send the walnut to those with the best eyesight, and the maple to older folks who might have a hard time reading. I told them if I got a maple invite they’d be getting a third tier gift from us haha.
Since I’m leaving the masking on for them, that might actually be a cool idea for the walnut. Maybe a brass or light bronze spray to lighten it a bit. I’ve done this on other things but hadn’t considered it here. Thanks!
Ah - ok. Unfortunately I don’t think that will happen any time soon, since a corner that prevented it from moving backward would prevent larger material from fitting (that extends towards the back of the machine) as well. I like your idea of an L-piece with fiducial registration on it, though.
Awesome! The 3 point fiducial ruler would be incredibly useful for many things.
An idea for a 0,0 corner outside of the L shaped ruler wothout having to add anything:
Just remove enough plastic to have a small gap/slot (maybe 1 inch) in the side rails of the tray which would allow you to lay down a ruler perpendicularly across the tray to act as the restraining guide on the y axis. Then all you would need is a standard 1" wide ruler
I know it’s a bit late in the game for that, as you’ve probably finalized all that stuff, but would be an easy fix going forward if you ever did decide to change.
Great idea!
Does all this talk of L shaped rules with fiducials being a good idea mean that double sided cutting is blown? If the second side can be aligned accurately by looking at the work piece edges with the cameras why can’t the first side be auto aligned? In which case there would be no need for any jigs at all once double sided cuts are implemented.
Would screwing a little aluminum tab in the back corner of the crumb tray that we could rotate up for work when we want the back positioned exactly/reliably and rotate down (sideways so it’s below the tray surface) void our warranty?
Here’s an idea, not sure how feasible it will be.
If you can recognize an L-shaped ruler with fiducials, could you make a jig with fiducials?
For example, say you want to laser etch a bunch of pens. You cut out the jig and etch in fiducials, which you can store in the Glowforge. When you go to etch the pens, you tell it you are using the Pen jig. It will look for the fiducials and etch accordingly. So you don’t need to square the jig to anything.
There are a few software additions that would have to be made for this to work though. You would need a “Jig” mode when creating and saving the Jig. And then you would need the ability to recall Jig so it knows where the fiducials are.
Thanks for taking the time to put together this write up and with the excellent pictures. I know we’re all busy so we appreciate all your work to show us the amazing things you can do with a Glowforge!
Cool! And you zap things barefoot.
Haha! Fingers crossed you don’t get the third tier invite!
Yeah I think the floral graphic would look awesome with a lighter color on the walnut!
Also a note from your Friendly Neighborhood Stationer have them handcancelled!
You shouldn’t need fiducials, the corners should be sufficient. If the GF can orient a doubled sided cut by looking at the edges it should be able to auto centre any artwork to a blank sheet. In this case you would pretend the jig is the sheet you intend to cut from. Place it anywhere and then ask the GF to align your artwork to it.
Sorry to sound like a broken record but if GF can do double sided cuts and pass through alignment with the cameras is should be able to align to any vaguely rectangular shape to a very high degree of accuracy. However we have never seen any evidence it can do that, just lots of talk of jigs and fiducials. This makes me think it is vary long way off doing camera alignment.
Amen for numeric positioning!
No.
I think you could accomplish this just as easily with a simple piece of rectangular scrap pushed against the rear wall, but I haven’t tried it.
Very cool idea!
Please don’t take my discussion with the members of this forum as evidence of anything other than my enjoyment of talking with members of the forum about the topics that interest them.
Isn’t there a gap between the back of the tray and the rear wall? I didn’t look deep inside when I was at the MakerFaire and I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone’s photos show that area. My other lasers have a gap between the front & back of the materials bed so a piece of scrap would fall down. Unless I used some kind of solid block of wood.
