Many other programs have a “basic” mode and “advanced user” mode. It would be nice to have a screen that pulls back the curtain to give real speeds and power controls for the engineering/exact value type people in the community.
I’m fine with there being the “kessel run in 12 parsecs” speed/power units for those that just don’t care to know… ( or proofgrade it just cuts and scores correctly and I don’t have to know units).
No it isn’t. The engraving effect is roughly proportional to energy density. Any deviation from that is due to non linear effects due to material properties like heat conduction, latent heat of vaporisation, etc. You can’t compensate for that with a non linear speed scale because it is very material dependent.
The speed scale is simply to make nice round numbers in the GUI and obfuscate the settings as much as possible. This is to make the PG settings appear like magic and make it as hard as possible to make your own non PG settings and use settings from other machines.
Under the hood the GF uses metric units for everything, mm per minute for speed. It is just the GUI that converts everything to bonkers units for display.
You know that was a quote from the epilog user manual right? Nothing to do with GF
Not a quote as I haven’t read it. But I do know the GF speed scale has nothing to do with material properties. It simply maps the old ips scale to 100 to 1000.
That’s nonsense. All it takes is exactly what you have to do with other lasers - print out some calibration tests. Not that hard and the same thing people have been doing for years. Google laser engraver calibration tool and you’ll find lots of them on the web - all from before there was a GF.
I can’t reliably use settings from Trotec, Epilog or ULS lasers on the Redsail, K40 or GF (or on the big 3 either). I don’t know what 50% speed or power means without checking tech specs for the model & year of the source machine - if I know the model & year. Even then, is the % of power (or worse 10ma) representative of a new tube, old tube, in between tube? Does it represent the % of the rated tube in Watts or the actual. Is it a % of a % because the machine is configured to be throttled down so “100%” indicated is really “95%” rated because tubes die earlier when run at levels in the high 90 percents?
I can guess on all of those things but that’s no more accurate than guessing on the GF. The “precision” of those speeds and percentages leads to an unsupported level of confidence in projections to another machine.
The only thing that’s reliable between machines is using calibration designs and experience. Anything else is just faith in a different kind of magical thinking or one’s own hubris.
1000 “precisions”.
And 1-100 laserness.
pews and zooms
Close the polls, the names are set. I can’t top this, or come close.
Now I have to relabel my tracking spreadsheet. @dan the GFUI needs to be updated from speed/power to zooms/pews.
Ever since i started diving we have accepted Frogfish as a unit of measure.
I admit it might not be the most accurate of measures.
(For purists out there only Antennarius commerson, the Giant Frogfish is valid)
Yes you can do pure trial and error but you can’t take a reasoned approach. Suppose you find the correct speed to just cut through at full power but you don’t like the charred edges, so you want to try two passes. A starting point would be twice as fast for two passes but you can’t double a GF speed by multiplying it by two. So perhaps halve the power, but you can’t half full power because they won’t say what 100 is.
Say you have a score setting which goes to the depth you want but there is two much corner over burn. If you reduce the speed by say a factor of three then the acceleration distance will be a ninth. To get the same depth you want to reduce the power by three but again you can’t without converting to real units, dividing by three and converting back to GF units.
I don’t see any benefit at all to the user by using obscured units. It only makes it harder to understand.
Doesn’t look anything like a frog!
Arbs.
That’s not correct. But I’m an engineer so sometimes a disciplined & reasoned approach that works for me for things doesn’t work or isn’t apparent to others. No biggie. Worked for me.
They are not denominated in any physical units - like the volume knob on a stereo.
