Or rather trade my basic (no filter) unit to someone who has one with snapmarks in the northeastern US. I’ll add $250 to make this trade as this feature has been something I really wanted as I engrave a ton on small items.
Single stage engraves? Like a simple single engrave?
If so, you can jig this stuff easily. In fact, if you’re doing a lot, jigs will end up being faster and more reliable than snaps. I should really write up a tutorial for this, advanced jig techniques, because so many people seem to think they’re hard and they just aren’t.
Snaps have their uses, but they are not the end-all.
9 Likes
I don’t want to burst any bubbles, but I’m not sure it would do you any good to buy a unit with Snapmarks enabled. As soon as the location of the machine is shifted, it will be set up as a new machine and it will probably lose snapmarks ability. I’m sorry.
But that was a creative idea for getting around the problem. You could easily handle creating jigs … they are just as easy as Snapmarks.
3 Likes
I’m not sure I would make that assumption. Snap marks is machine based, not account based. I might check w GF about it to be safe.
4 Likes
I believe that Snapmarks are enabled on machines manually by the team at this point, by assigning a flag permission to people’s accounts, based on the metrics for the individual machines that they wanted to look at. And it’s been put on hold. Without that flag being set, snapmarks is disabled on that machine.
(I just don’t want anyone to assume that the snapmarks ability comes along for the ride with the machine…it might not. There might be some manual intervention required by the team and it is on hold for now.)
4 Likes
Part of making this post is to show there is money behind these requests. I’ve had some time to digest the snapmark news and it’s still infuriating because the even with good alignment, you can’t do a lot of work that snapmarks made possible.
I run with jigs all the time, and going through the steps to align them each time is removed from this process completely with snaps, as well as throwing jigs out when they have finished their use.
I’ve been waiting for snapmarks to remake high quality jigs that will see many uses in multi-setup cases.
I’d still always love to see more uses and tips about jigs, so I don’t want to dissuade you from making more detailed tutorials, thats always better for the whole community!
1 Like
I have no doubt that they will do something with Snapmarks down the road. Too many people are interested in them. 
These problems are well and truly solved for the vast majority of cases. “Advanced” jig techniques, no snaps needed.
Then I can’t wait to see more!
I know that folks like to dissect every nuance of language used by GF, but Dan was pretty clear on this.
Can’t find it at the moment, but he also said along the lines of “If you have snapmarks now, you’ll keep them. If you don’t have them now, you won’t get them because we’re focusing on rolling out the new calibration routine.”
4 Likes
Yep. I got the impression it was going to be left at status quo for now. (Might be wrong, but not worth the chance. He doesn’t say things he doesn’t stick to.)
2 Likes
Most of the concepts are discussed here:
I always get to the same point about writing my jig techniques up: writing up tutorials is time consuming, and eh, people will figure it out… it’s mostly up there already anyway.
Had snapmarks, lost snapmarks with new machine. Snapmarks didn’t work with cutting my larger puzzles anyways, since the size/bed usage forced the Snapmarks to go into a location that couldn’t be recognized.
For actual cutting and engraving, I can make a jig (reusable even) that is just as fast and accurate as using Snapmarks.
Where Snapmarks really exceeded for me was the smaller puzzles and doing print and cut (printing the Snapmarks rather than utilizing a jig). It wasn’t necessarily an accuracy thing - it was just removing a step from the process of making them.
3 Likes
I have snapmarks and last night I used a jig, for some very precise work, because it was faster. Snapmarks are faster for most jig work, but that’s it. Only when used in combination with the pass through slot can they do things not practically achievable by any other means.
I am not trying to convince you snapmarks aren’t useful, or even desirable, in a lot of jig work. But just like at my non-laser-based job, re-engineering the process usually yields much better results than the current status quo when the technology fix is denied us by the budget.
2 Likes
Still. There’s no guarantee that Snapmarks won’t stop working on a particular machine, and I doubt they’ll help troubleshoot it. And at some point, it may go away for everyone. If I had some sort of business process that depended on Snapmarks, I’d be trying to eliminate that dependency rather than spending money on a machine that might not have it for long.
5 Likes
Just in case – have you done the camera calibration routine? With that and the Set Focus tool, and a means of lining up your jig parallel to the front each time you put it in (to eliminate rotational error), you should be able to do whatever you need to.
This topic was automatically closed 32 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.