Weekly Highlights for the Week ending April 8th, 2017

[Jules]

Last Week: Highlights for the Week Ending April 1st, 2017

Staff Comments

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April Status Update

April 2017 update

Happy April! Our team is working like mad towards shipping you your Glowforge, and we’re making amazing progress. Our team continues to grow - you can see us all here, and join us here. We’re working hard towards our shipping schedule, and making some huge progress. For this update, I went through my phone and grabbed a dozen or so pictures. Pardon the poor image quality of all the photos I’ve included. Having learned my lesson after the first three Pro units from the factory were torn apar…

Hello Glowforge - Episode 1

NEW video: Hello Glowforge Episode 1

[Custom Laser Cut Tokens with Trace - Glowforge 3D Laser Printer] Got ideas for the next episode? I want to hear em below!

Custom Laser Cut Tokens with Trace - Glowforge 3D Laser Printer

What about keeping a list of successful print settings?

The Hopeful Makings of a Scroll Saw, on a Glowforge

That is in the hopper (we’ve talked about it a few times - super handy feature).

Is there a range of hours that defines “heavy use” for the machine?

Discussion of March '17 update

No, it’s just a rough way to describe the difference between, for example, a pro user who might be running the machine most of the day in a workshop, versus a home user who mostly uses it on nights and weekends.

Is there a problem using a different power cord for the machine? (It causes a problem with cutters.)

It's April 1 Somewhere

These are standard IEC power cords, not voltage adapters, so the cutter problem shouldn’t be an issue.

Does the filter require space behind it for breathing room?

A new look on dimensions

Re: air, you’ll want some clearance in the back and on the right for “breathing room” (I don’t have exact numbers for you unfortunately). For the passthrough, the front and back are slotted with a flexible curtain, so it does not protrude at all.

How does the filter connect to the Glowforge?

A new look on dimensions

It’s actually a U-bend that connects them in the back (the aforementioned macaroni comment). The filter intake is directly below the Glowforge exhaust.

What kind of Customer Support is Glowforge going to offer?

https://community.glowforge.com/t/support-launch/6810/32?u=jules

Why do we have a place to enter the material thickness for focus in the machine if the machine is auto-focusing?

God Bless America! - UPDATED with Wood Base

If the focus height is left at the default, it uses autofocus instead. If you change it, it doesn’t use the autofocus. (@Tony, correct me if I’m wrong).

Is the Proofgrade Store open yet?

Discussion of the April '17 update

Only for beta and prerelease customers so far, I’m afraid. We’ll let you know when you can use it!

Chadmart1076 wants a pony. (so does jules)

Discussion of the April '17 update

Unfortunately it’s missing as of this morning - I’m guessing it fell down & the cleaning folks took it. Are you wondering about the alignment, or the quality of cutting on paper, or something else? No ETA yet. We have a bunch of testing setups - many of them at 3rd party contractors who do specialized tests on our behalf, so unfortunately not always ours to share. Hey @Tony, @chadmart1076 wants a pony.

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Beta and PreRelease

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Shot Glass Carrier

Shot glass carrier

Due to more of my wife’s work shenanigans I bought her six similar shot glasses at the thrift store. In a burst of inspiration I made a custom carrier for them. Beginning to end this project took about 1/2 an hour and I am quite happy with it. The blue tape denotes the 1.5 oz fill mark. I am going to replace the bolts with something prettier later. [image]

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Johann es Ironman (e-NABLE build)

Made Better With a Glowforge

It’s been a crazy weekend. As much as I wanted to focus on exploring the Glowforge’s capabilities, I was also committed to finishing an e-NABLE build, an Ironman-themed device for a young man in Mexico. Then the thought popped into my head — How can I use the Glowforge to make this better? 5 minutes of laser time later… [image] The artwork was a jpeg from the interwebs [image] The soft focus was caused by me taking the image with one hand while manipulating the hand to grip the plaque with…

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More Fun Things

Made a few more little things

Used the GF’s design of the picture frame with living hinge to make this customized one (ummm, I had to blur out the logo of the theme party…sshhh) [image] I tink I forgot to remove some of the backing, lol. Anyway, it was fun & easy to make, but the back piece’s engraving (the big dark patch on the pic) took a while, since it basically has to cut a pretty large area with just a pin needle width laser, so it takes time to cover the whole area. If you are making a lot of these, you might be…

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Take Note

Take note

I’ve been wanting to do some more with leather and decided I’d make a nice pencil holder for the notebook I embellished. I started by taking a scrap of paper and folding it and stapling it together around some pencils to roughly estimate the design I was thinking of. Then I took the staples out of it and flattened it out again to measure the spacing between my “staple seams”. I cleaned it up a bit in Illustrator and ended up with this design that is basically a tri-fold of 4"x4" squares with …

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Couple Projects

Pre Release: A couple little projects

Hey folks, me again. I’ve been trying to stay away from the computer (and the GF) today because I did too much mousing the last few days and my hand/arm has gone all carpal-tunnelly. Not a big deal, it’s already better, just need to take it easy. I did do a couple projects yesterday and they are nothing special but folks seem to want to see output so I’ll show them anyway. Throw a tomato my way if you are getting tired of them! First was a practical solution for my husband: a set of templa…

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Lighting the Way

Pre-Release | Lighting the Way

All the electronics are custom. The controller is a sparkcore running a sketch that can talk to SmartThings. (Same everything is in the house number project) In fact the two are sync’d to each other. When the house number triggers (runs a color pattern and plays a song or a sound effect) the path lighting echos the same colors/pattern. All of that is inside the first path light with 5V running to it. Everything is wireless. [image]

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Ichigo and Co

Pre-Release | Ichigo & Co

Supplies: Glass from a dollar store picture frame & Proofgrade 1/8" Cherry Ply - Op Time: 27mins Glass. [image] [image] [image] Cherry. [image] [image]

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Memorial and Spinner (Proofgrade Acrylic)

1/4" Proofgrade Clear Acrylic: Memorial and Spinner

I got that big haul of 1/4" Chemcast acrylic (thanks @cynd11) and knew I’d work on a spinner with it. And I also had a four foot by one foot piece of .43" acrylic to use. Then I found my 1/4" Proofgrade acrylic sheet. There were some initial problems with reading that Proofgrade’s QR code (support notified), but when I was ready to come back to it, it registered and performed flawlessly. Here are pics of the two end projects: [image] This is a memorial to a dog that made the final journey. O…

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Tic Tac Toe(Catalog Design)

Beta Design Catalog Project - Tick-Tack-Toe

Here it is! Another Beta Design Catalog project! And wouldn’t you know it… it’s another game! There isn’t much room for customizing this one, so I just printed it as-is and it came out great! This is 1/8" cherry hardwood. I could flip the tile over and engrave the lid I suppose… but I didn’t really think about it. Now that I do think about it, that would make a cool kid’s party favor. Have the boards pre-cut (engraving the spaces takes a fair amount of time), and then have each kid draw a pict…

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Just a Quick One

Pre-Release: Just a Quick One

We were at Ace Hardware last night and I scored some cedar grilling skewers, which I thought would be a lot of fun for tags and such. [image] I still can’t spend a lot of time on the computer on account of my hand, but I just had to try it. It took 3 tries to get the engrave settings to not cut all the way through (these skewers are .1" thick and .35" high), and I could still increase the speed a bit to make the engrave shallower. I think it looks nice in the Papyrus font, don’t you? …

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Trace Test on Cardstock

Prerelease Trace Test on Cardstock

Continuing the discussion from No Foolin': and also this excellent topic: We have had many discussions about the accuracy of this function. Here is an example of the different steps. I also show the use of masking on a paper product, .012" cardstock (thanks again @cynd11!). I also show why I do not use this function much as you can see from the hand drawn cat/pig that is the subject. [image] Cat/pig drawn directly on Laserbits masking with a fine point Sharpie. The masking is applied on bo…

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Extruded vs Cast Acrylic Engraves

Local Dealers rock

Here are the two engraves. I already had one in cast, so I just did one in extruded as well. Probably not the best image to use for an example, but you can hopefully see which is of better quality. [image] [image]

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New Pre-Releaser! (Congrats @jamesdhatch !)

1/4" Proofgrade Clear Acrylic: Memorial and Spinner

Left is using the PG auto settings, right is using the manual override @Rita provided. [image] This is after removing the masking. The manual settings are fine. Although you can see the pinpricks where the scoring corners are. That’s also being tweaked. [image] Here’s what the masking looked like. Top is PG auto settings and bottom is the manual override version. [image]

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And another New Pre-Releaser! (Congrats @henryhbk !)

Delivering babies

So for those of you who have kids, you know that the moment of birth is a life altering moment for you. As a doctor you get to participate in a moment in people’s lives that is truly incredible. Delivering a baby is truly the highlight of your day, although the waiting can make it seem like a marathon by the time it happens. People have waited and waited and with incredible anticipation, and the day finally comes. There is of course some agony mixed in with the waiting, but when the moment of d…

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Test for Slicer for Fusion 360

Slicer for F360 - Tested on a GF

There have been quite a few discussions about Autodesk’s Slicer for F360, so I thought I would run a little experiment. I loaded one of their sample shapes, reduced the number of cuts and the size so that it would fit on a single sheet of cardboard, and told it how thick the material was (0.060"). It popped out a PDF that loaded fine in the GFUI. 3 minutes and 14 seconds later… [image][image] So, it works… slicer test plan.pdf (77.8 KB)

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Passover Name Cards - Second Project

Second project of the day

So last year if you recall I did this insanity for our Passover dinner for the name cards. It was beyond exhausting as I had just gotten my printer working that week, and cranking this stuff through, and hadn’t really mastered the art of merging meshes etc, So this year, since I have been on nights, and frantically cranking out abscess simulators (I will post in my ongoing medical molding thread when they are ready) on both my printers which are humming 24x7 (going through 4kg/wk of PETg) I h…

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Third Project - Dog Tags

A little night cap - testing anodized aluminum engrave

I so need to go to sleep, but anyway, one last thing for the evening… Unlike @karaelena I decided my new iPad pro would not be first test, but with a wife who is a vet, figured hey, let’s try dog tags. 20 seconds in AI, export as a 600dpi PNG. Placed a dog bone on the honeycomb and used the ruler to square it up (that’s going to be a challenge, without some sort of grid thing like I have on my X-Carve and FR4 CNCs) and I suppose in the future I will make a jig… Anyway, here is a 600 dpi engrav…

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Garden Stakes (Proofgrade Acrylic)

Pre-Release | Garden Stakes

Supplies: Proofgrade 1/8" frosted acrylic - Op time: 18 mins My wife made these this past weekend. [image] [image] [image] [image]

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God Bless America

God Bless America! - UPDATED with Wood Base

My two young boys have been obsessed lately with the American Revolution, and so I decided to go with that theme for my next draft project; an engraved acrylic sign. A HUGE thank you those of you who have posted this kind of project in the past; @smcgathyfay @marmak3261 armak3261 (apologies if I have missed anyone) like this: ProofGrade Projects and Pre-Release Glowforge mini acrylic LED sign - #18 by jamesdhatch Please keep in mind that this was just a ROUGH test run, so it’s o…

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And another new Pre-Releaser! (Congrats @Xabbess !)

What amazing fun!

Received a pre-release Glowforge yesterday, and with the help of my kind son-in-law, was able to get it up and running quickly. At first, we had a connection issue, but that wasn’t on Glowforge, that was on me. We started out mainly doing traces, so that the two youngest grandsons could go home with a ‘souvenir’. They also made one each for two older brothers that weren’t able to be there. I first made my ruler, using the template provided by Glowforge. The ruler is becoming more and more the sy…

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Forno Di David

A faceplate for the Forno - Prerelease

So first project of the night: Tomorrow we are going over my cousin’s house nearby, and the highlight of their house, is when they renovated it they installed a ginormous dual fired pizza oven (required massive steel supports and a crane to get it into the house through a huge hole in the kitchen outside wall). Anyway, I thought a sign would be nice: Solid proofgrade maple. Set it all up as 2 levels of engrave, a score and finally a cut. So first attempt was a pretty spectacular failure. It s…

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Knife Block - Proofgrade Veneer Inlay

Knife Block - Inlay (In Progress)

Okay, you guys know those really fancy, (really expensive), knife blocks that were all the rage a few years ago? You can stick the knife anywhere into it and it just stays there? I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try to duplicate the effect without spending a fortune. So I whipped up a little nouveau-looking-ish design from a dingbat that I liked, ordered the things I thought I’d need, made it up with Proofgrade cherry and walnut, and gave it a little Proofgrade walnut veneer i…

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Deep Engrave Torture Test

Last one for night - unintentional torture test of variable focus

I can’t remember if @Dan said that variable focus is fully functional but I just tested it big time… So went to simply engrave my division’s logo, and figured a good time to figure out how to invert something with a boolean difference in AI. So nailed that down and decided to do a deep engrave with the letters standing out in proof grade maple. Selected the 2nd from darkest for the engrave settings. Um, who here (who isn’t a laser user already) knew that wood curls like plastic when it gets ho…

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Parametric Box - Free Laser Design

Parametric Box from Free Laser Design

This has been on my things to do list all week. I wanted to demo the free laser design for a parametric box that was very kindly supplied by @mpipes here: Parametric Box with Finger Joints - Fusion 360 file I had no trouble at all creating a box in my chosen dimensions including kerf. The model worked great! My only problem was getting the dxf into my old version of Illustrator (5.0.2). I just can’t import dxf files. So I went through an online converter, and that changed the sizes (to mu…

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Pi Enclosure

Glowforge WiFi Pi Enclosure

Ok — time to test out that Proofgrade acrylic. Definitely not an artistic build, but I had a hardware project that I thought would be perfect as a first acrylic test. Although the wifi signal in my workshop is fine, I had an unused Raspberry Pi 3 laying around as well as an open port on my ethernet router, so I decided to turn it into a dedicated wifi hotspot for my Glowforge. Idle hands…:smiling_imp: I grabbed a design from Thingiverse and dropped it into the GFUI. The only adjustment I mad…

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Dispatches from the Front

Dispatches from the front....(Pre-Release report)

So I’ve been futzing with the GF a bit. Here’s a pic of this weekend’s adventure (so far). I did address some stink reduction as well so things are going swimmingly. I ran into a couple of issues today. The first was with my Center Ruler - it’s a 0 centered scale so you can drop it on something and find the center without math My problem was with the print. I did the rectangle of the ruler in black and the letters/numbers and tick marks in red. I uploaded, told the GFUI…

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Scan and Trace Functions on the Glowforge

Prerelease Trace Test on Cardstock

Here is a demo video of the process of tracing from a hand drawn image. Not so frightful, but fairly mundane is the drawing. [Scan and Trace Functions on a pre-release Glowforge laser]

Scan and Trace Functions on a pre-release Glowforge laser

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Forum

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Metal Inlay

Wire inlay from instructables

Thought this was really interesting and can see utilizing this to put some accents on projects. I don’t think i could do what he does, right now anyway. But thought id share!

Strand Beest Pattern - Free Designs

Free Laser Design | Laser Friendly Strandbeest

Alright I finally got around to pulling my first design together all the way through from Fusion to Inkscape and then back out as a SVG. First credit where credit is due: -This design is based on dimensions created by Theo Jansen and not myself. If you’re interested in learning more about Strand Beests go to his website or YouTube. Seriously. They’re amazing -Special thanks to @Jules @markevans36301 @marmak3261 @takitus and probably several more who I can’t think up right now who have been so …

Laser Engraved Projects

Laser engraved projects

I have access to a 60w Gravograph laser at work and figured I would share some of the items I make on it. It has a 24 in x 24 in bed that has a 12 in vertical adjustment. [image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image]

Parametric Box with Finger Joints - Fusion 360 File

Parametric Box with Finger Joints - Fusion 360 file

Throwing this one out there for Fusion 360 users to mess with. This is a fully parametric box. You can adjust material thickness, height, width and length. The number of finger joints on each side is set, but the length of the joint will adjust to fit the dimension of that particular face of the box. If you download the file you will see User Parameters relating to Laser Kerf. The plan is to make kerf adjustment fully parametric as well and build that into the model but I have not yet gotten to…

Parametric Flex Boxes in OpenSCAD - Free Designs

Parametric 2 part Flex Boxes

It’s been a while since I posted anything because I’ve been busy making actual laser cutters but I just completed this OpenSCAD script to make 2 part parametric flex boxes. The scripts are hosted over at github so you can feel free to improve upon them and I intend to write an instructable this evening to describe how to use them for anyone who needs a few more pointers. https://github.com/vanillabox/OpenSCADBoxes [image]

Journal Cover - Free Laser Design

Free Laser Design | Journal Cover

Here is the Journal Cover template that I promised. It’s what I used to create this project. If you want to create a back cover as well, don’t forget to rotate it 180 degrees. Enjoy! small journal cover.svg.zip (1.2 KB) Forgot to mention, even if you don’t have a spiral punch for the inside pages, I’m pretty sure you could take them to a Kinko’s and get them punched. I know they do spiral binding. Office Depot does it too.

Parametric Globe Ball Stand

Parametric Globe/Ball Stand - Fusion 360

OK this was a fun one! Key Features: You can enter the desired Ball/Sphere diameter, and the entire design scales proportionally to fit! Right now it’s set at 300mm, but you can change that to any number you want, large or small! Within reason, of course, at the extreme small end of the scale the slots will not work right. You can set any number of support legs you like. When you change that parameter, the number of slots in the support ring will update automatically. Material thicknes…

SVGs to Share

SVGs to share

I’m going through some of my old SVG files and found a few design elements to share. Not sure if/how they will translate into cutting files, but maybe someone can use them. (A few of the SVG images don’t show well so I attached a jpg view.) [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image] [image][image][image][image][image][image] [image][image][image][image] [image] [image]

[hansepe]

Another excellent compilation @Jules - thank you very much.

[davidgal2]

You are getting really good at this. Thank you for all of your hard work.

[mheiselt]

As always, thanks so much for putting these together @Jules. The forum is getting crazy (mostly in a good way), so this is nice.

[Tom_A]

Thanks again! You always manage to include something that I missed!

[PlGHEADED]

Thanks for all your effort @Jules !! (And for putting up with some of us…)

[Jules]

Fair is fair…you have to put up with me, and that’s likely much worse…