i’m using ‘them’ to mean people using the laser, not the company. i think it’s obvious that i find this change to be…not unwise, perhaps, but definitely strange. especially since it’s a huge change that was rolled out with little explanation.
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So, would it just be possible to adapt what GF has as a speed of “500”, make it cut along a straight line while recording it on a camera phone to figure out it’s velocity? Do a few more data points and interpolate the data from there? Doesn’t need to be that accurate, right?!
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There is a spreadsheet that shows how to convert the old inches per minute figures to the new scale, so we don’t have to measure it. Looks like we will have to measure power though.
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i really need more than one like for that post.
i’m a n00b. but i’m also adventurous and will talk / work with others in the laser cutting world. and will some time next year have access to a 75w universal laser at work. i’d rather not have to learn multiple systems and try to figure out how to translate what i’m doing to what everyone outside the GF world is doing (and vice versa, when i’m learning from others).
if we need an advanced tab to still have access to traditional cutting measurements, please make that happen so those of us who want to communicate with laser cutting users outside of this forum will be able to do so w/o tedious conversions and don’t, as mentioned above a couple of times, turn GF users into “those people.”
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Dangit, I missed that one. I’m with you @palmercr on this. Not having units would drive me nuts! It’s the first thing I look at when I see any graph…I look to see if the axes are labeled first to give me an idea what I’m looking/working with. It’s not going to make me ask for a return, but I do wonder why things are tailored to the ignorant person. To the already ignorant person, if units were included, they wouldn’t notice, because they’re already ignorant! It’s like nutrition tables.
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It’s like smartphones. There’s the basic/simplified version that non-tech-savvy folks run with and then the normal mode that has all the bells and whistles!
A number without a unit is useless.
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In this case though their is nothing easier about a scale that goes 100 to 500 than one that goes 10 to 400 that would be cm / minute. Particularly as 100 in the new scale is not 5 times slower than 500 it is actually 40 times slower.
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Ugh, that hurts my head!
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Yes I don’t think they could have made it more confusing than having a scale that has an offset as well as a multiplier. It would make anyone believe you only have a 1:5 range of control but you actually have a 1:40 range.
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No one has commented on the increased resolution of the new units. For engrave, the old IPM scale went from 4 to 335 vs new units from 100 to 1000. Assuming integer value selections, this increases the selection resolution by about 2.5 times. Being a laser noob, I don’t know if this increased resolution has any practical value. I have observed that users on this forum tend to round up or down by tens or fives when reporting their non-proofgrade speed values. Being an engineer, I would vote for retaining the IPM units with an option to switch to metric. But, I can adapt, if necessary, using a table like this.
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Yes but simply switching to cm/m would give the same resolution and have the advantage of not having the 100 offset and be real world units convertible to inches by a simple Google query.
Since half the people didn’t like inches/min and the other half won’t like mm/sec GF just changed the scale to toenails per yawn (100-1000). There, now you have the units. Nothing will satisfy everyone no matter how much I might think one way is better than the other…
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Except no one uses “toenails per yawn”… but Glowforge, apparently.
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Got to admit…it’s not something you’re likely to forget! Chuckle!
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And there is no known distance or speed measurement that doesn’t start at 0 apart from this one. 90 would be 0 on this scale.
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I agree but the GFUI could easily provide the user the option to select English or metric units. If the “toenails per yawn” units have any real value it could be a third option. Unfortunately, all of my notes on material settings from current Forum Glowforge users will need to be revised if this change becomes permanent. Future Forum commenters will need to explicitly state what units they are using in their comments. I see the potential for lots of confusion going forward.
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this. let’s not create some random scale that has no meaning outside of the GFUI.
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Yes I had no real problem with the old units as I know what an inch looks like and I know the conversion factors to metric and so does Google… The only down side was the limits were odd values because the hardware seems to be metric.
This whole change to TpY (Toenails per Yawn) unit reeks of a bad group meeting answer to “how do we fix our use of imperial units to support metric in the GUI”… and the apparent answer was, “well how about if no one refers to units of any kind???”
It didn’t solve the problem. It just created another (unspecified) set of units, one that makes it so the entire world has to convert between it.
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