How firmly secure is your Glowforge seated? Is the surface it’s on allowing momentum that could be throwing it off? If the table is swaying as the Glowforge head moves, the extra inertia might be causing extra head movement that’s not accounted for. Try putting the GF on the floor maybe?
You could also try printing a checkerboard pattern. If you get lots of jagged staggered edges even within each checkered row, then chances the stepper motors are losing step. But if it remains slow and “wavy” on the full design edge then I’d think it’s sway induced?
The only explanation I can come up with is the material is expanding and contracting with the heat. If the X stepper was skipping you would get discontinuities in the verticals but these are smooth waves with local correlation in both dimensions.
I think it’s pretty secure. I’ll take note of that tonight though. I don’t think it’s shaking, or else there’d be jaggies. And I think I would have noticed a sway. There’s lots of stuff on that table and I just think I would have noticed if there was any movement at all.
The aluminum is .06" thick. I’m only ablating the extremely thin coating. I can’t imagine there’s much room for expansion/contraction. I guess I can’t rule it out… just seems unlikely that I’d see the same result in both aluminum and acrylic.
The waves are most obvious on the sides of the box. The base and the top look straight, but there’s really not enough length to tell. Perhaps an experiment with longer lines at the base and top? Does the laser head travel different distances side to side for the top, mid, and base of the image? Or because it’s from a jpg it moves down the image exactly the same? I’m not convinced yet that there is not some weird harmonic vibration going on. Can you try this with different sized pieces of Al?
Another thing to test is that the belts from the stepper motors to the head assembly could be loose, allowing play in movement. You should try gently wiggling the head on the spot and seeing how much slack it has before resisting. It should be very taut, without any play whatsoever.
My concern with people manually moving the head (to fix orientation) is that they may be reefing hard on the head and loosening the belts.
I’m confident there’s no play. I’d think I’d see that play, even if slight, when it’s calibrating.
It’s always perfectly solid. But it can’t hurt to check.
If there was a problem with the X axis you might get uneven movement but why would that be almost perfectly replicated on the next line?
Conversely if the Y axis was wonky one would expect an entire line to be shifted the same way.
It looks like the X axis alternates between lagging and leading as it scans along the line and does almost exactly the same on the next line but as it goes up the image the disturbance slowly changes.
Very odd, it sort of looks like the CPU clock is fed by an unstable PLL.
The original is your jpg from above. I took it to GIMP. Sharpened the image, converted it to b&w, then cleaned it up. Then I took it into inkscape and traced it. (I was stupid and exported it as a jpg from GIMP, if I did a bmp, it would have been cleaner.)
Thanks for that test!!! I’m going to do similar ASAP today. I’ll use the original image on , then trace in AI and see what difference that makes (if any).
It looks clean when you are zoomed out, but when you zoom in, it has a bunch of gray scale and shading and other random dots. If you convert it to Black and White right away, its a mess.
The baby is doing great, other then having another cold. This one isn’t as bad as some of the previous ones. She slept all the way through the night once! I did not, because I kept waking up and checking on her.
My wife and I try to rotate feedings so we can each get about 6 hours of sleep, more or less. I am responsible for the 6pm, 9pm and midnight feeding. My daughter consumes her milk pretty quickly, but the boy can take awhile. And then my daughter will fuss for a bit before going to sleep. Last night, I finally got to bed at 1:30 or so. My wife was then up at 2:15 as my daughter was already clamoring for the 3am feeding. And my wife was up again at dawn for the 6am feeding. And so it goes every night. I sleep, but am somewhat aware of the activity during that time. 1 month as of today.
Yeah… I made sure my Wife provided some… food… so I could feed the kids. I don’t know that women fully understand the experience/bond they get to have with children that men simply can never come close to. (Yes… I know… Grass is always greener…) So I was always careful to try and do everything I could possibly do. I never minded the diapers and things. It’s funny to see new parents… We all do the same things… Kid sleeps through the night? So that just means you wake up every hour, make sure they’re breathing, then go back to sleep. Luckily that dissipates a little as time goes by.
, then trace in AI and see what difference that makes (if any).
I did change & wash diapers (cloth ones, not disposables).
