From the videos seen thus far it looks like you’ve got:
but I was curious what other devices you plan to have engraving templates available upon launch?
Will there be a tutorial etc available to teach people how to create these themselves for devices that aren’t listed? (obviously in a way that doesn’t require failed attempts on expensive devices 
)
Alternatively… will there be templates to cut wood/plastic to the shape of said devices, so we have “blanks” on which we can practice our final design for our devices.
Would be an interesting feature to include a “Clone Object” command, where we can place a phone on one side, acrylic or wood slab on the other, and have it cut and engrave to match the shape.
The only other one we’ve announced so far is the Trackr (https://www.thetrackr.com/) - their team sent us a bunch of them and they engrave beautifully! There will likely be more, but we haven’t started planning for how that’ll work yet. We have a mix of Android and iOS people at the office, so expect more to come. : )
Would it be feasible to provide some instructions on how you go about profiling an electronic device to get the right engraving settings without destroying a few of them in the process? I suspect that plenty of your customers might be more than willing to run with those instructions and work out the details for the devices they have if it is even remotely doable. If you also give us a way to submit our resulting designs to the catalogue too, it could greatly increase the speed at which your list of supported devices grows.
Of course, user-submissions of engraving settings for expensive devices would warrant an extra level of scrutiny by your team to ensure that no designs with settings that would likely destroy the targeted device find their way into the catalogue, but that would be less work (and expense) for your team than developing them all yourselves would be!
The ideal way to figure out settings would be to find out what the case of your device is made of, and obtain some of that as raw material to play with.
Since there is likely some coating or paint, this isn’t flawless.
Getting an extra case is likely not a cheap option.
But making friends with a local pawn shop or repair shop, where people like to discard of broken old devices, would pay off greatly.
This strategy works wonders for older devices. And in many cases the newer devices are upgrades of older ones, maintaining the same type of case. So it can work on newer devices as well.
Barring any of that at all being possible, it never hurts to write to a company and request a sample, explaining that you intend to customize and sell them. In some cases, the company just gives out samples without bothering to verify vendor status, accepting whatever random losses may happen as a lower cost than vetting every request. In other cases, they may ask for a vendor license, or an estimate of sales level anticipated.
If you aren’t successful in THAT endeavor… then you start practicing on your own device. Line up what you want as a final engraving, and run it at the highest speed and lowest power. Likely this does not engrave at all. Begin shifting power up, or speed down, watching for the moment it starts to engrave.
Once you can see anything at all engrave on the device, you either run that exact same setting a few more times (it will get darker each pass), or you bring speed down, or you bring power up. Either of those three options makes the engraving darker, and the computer control ensures you are always running over the exact same path (as long as you don’t move anything).
Practice this gradual increase of power on wood or other scrap material a few times, and you will get a decent sense for how large of changes in speed and power you should be safe making, and what difference to expect from an extra pass.
Yeah I was thinking similar, a levelling template that allowed you to test and tune on a broken device would be useful. Similar to the “profiling” template they’re going to have to allow you to test new standard materials.
Perhaps the camera auto height option will come into play here though and it’ll just be the same test profile as mentioned above.
As for materials; I’d likely just be scouting ebay for dead units or speaking to my local phone repair store.
We actually just buy the devices (broken, on ebay, although it’s surprising how much even a nonfunctional current-generation Macbook Air sells for) and test them ourselves, for the most part.
wait, does that mean that you are not able to test them for functionality afterwards?
@jacobturner , @dan I have a pile of old devices that I will be testing once my GF arrives. In particular, I have the remains of my first (awesome) Titanium Powerbook. The screen is no longer attached to the chassis. I am curious, if I put just the screen in the GF, titanium-side up, if the GF will miss-recognize it as a whole tiBook, and adjust the height setting for the additional half-inch of missing chassis. Will the “device template” bypass the cameras/height sensor? or will the “template” be solely for the identification of the product material, and rely on the other sensors for height, etc.
I would be happy to start filming “will it cut or will it burn” videos, but I doubt that I will get one of the first units. There was already $5 million worth of preorders by the time I got mine in! (which, btw… Damn!)
Ha! That’s awesome. We’ll probably use the z-depth sensor to sanity check that the height is right, but we haven’t got that far into the feature. Good call.
–dan