Exactly, the corners won’t be visible. Sorry @dan but this is exactly the kind of response from you guys I just don’t get… Makes no sense (and it adds another 37 speculative crowd responses to the thread). Is the passthrough not supposed to be ‘infinite’? Corners are no use on the 2nd, 3rd etc passes.
Boy, I have some catchup to do on this thread. Dunno where some folk get the time…
One is upper left, one is upper right. The one that homes to the upper right may be because that’s the position the head is least exposed to damage when putting material in. Before I send a job I can define a 0,0 for the design. I can also tell the laser to set a logical home position anywhere on the bed. Typically I put both of those in the lower left (front left) of the bed. But I can move the machine’s logical origin someplace else when I’m using material that I’ve previously cut something out of. There’s a test trace function that will outline the cut area so I can make sure it’s going to fit.
This is essentially the use case for engraving on shot glasses.
Examples requested of projects that could benefit from an exact registration from known origin on cut bed coordinated with an identical origin in UI utilizing registered alignment.
Makes sense for the home position to be where the head is most out of the way but there is no reason for the origin to be at the home position. In fact I think it homes to the lid camera and then moves out of the way. So you have a home position and a park position, neither of which need to be the origin.
It will use the cutlines as fiducials. Sorry for the confusion: the corners are used as fiducials when flipping. The cut or engrave itself is used when using the passthrough.
Given the work area is substantially bigger than the cutting area the corners could well be outside of it. How far do the cameras reach? Is there is a third area bigger than the cutting area but smaller than the work area?
Are you asking how to lay out the design to be cut on something oversized? Because I hadn’t thought about that yet, but now curious Haha.
Maybe they’ll have a zoom out mode where instead of you resizing the image, you resize the bed and whole glowforge to fit the image. Then you can zoom back in and align the top corner where it needs to go
Yes something where the material is bigger than the cutting area but fits in the work area, which is substantially bigger. Possibly the corners aren’t visible to the camera but we might still want to flip and cut from both sides.
And on the pro we might want to do double sided pass through cuts so I don’t think it can be assumed the corners are visible for all double sided cuts.
The use cases for this can get very complicated and some scenarios might be impossible where there isn’t enough visible to register accurately. Having a complex pattern on the cover film might help. Or a pre engrave pass that adds fiducials.
Yeah. I do really think they need some barcode tape you can wrap around an edge for something like this. Would solve a lot of problems. Unless they have a solution.
But the one case I can see there being an issue is a 6 ft board you want something cut out of the dead center, so you have to flip it. Marking tape, or maybe a clip of some sort.
I think the the best idea I’ve seen is to have jigs with registration marks. But I think a very important extension of that is to have your svg snap to that alignment within the software. In other words, you can plop your jig in at a 2º angle one day, then 31.742º angle the next day, and it won’t matter because your image can just be rotated and snap to that alignment every time.
aye, I would love for as many of these as possible be in the tool box. if you are doing passthrough with full size materials you wont really be able to use a jig, so something else here would be necessary. Theyve got a lot of smart people up there though. Im sure they have some ideas up and coming that maybe they havent announced yet because theyre waiting on patents etc like the 3d engrave stuff. Im still pretty excited to see how this thing works!
Just a reminder, if you’ve got a 6 foot board in the past through, it won’t be thick enough to require a double sided cut, so that hole in the middle should be no problem; the maximum thickness going through is a quarter-inch.
Now you have me wondering if the secret reason they made the pass-through slot only 1/4 deep is so they wouldn’t have to deal with double-sided cutting on thick pass-through material?
Yes, I wonder if they would have made it taller if they’d known about this newfound ability to use the 3-D engrave capability to get through half an inch from one side!
I dont know if im planning on leaving it only 1/4" high 
True enough, people will make them taller, but we can’t reasonably expect the Glowforge team to build in support for a warranty ending modification either:wink: if you do that you’re basically on your own.
The fact that the front to back work area is so much bigger than the cutting area means that even without pass through the basic would benefit from a lot of the pass through type alignment so you can go from both edges of the material.
Yeah, we saw some very dismissive and non-engaging responses when raising the issue and requesting a deeper pass-thru slot. I think this was over a year ago now.
I agree. The Shaper Origin / https://shapertools.com registers using tape with unique markers. If we have paper sheeting with markers printed on them that we could stick onto whatever we’re cutting (not just proof grade), at least we should be able to identify centre & orientation from that, since the GF lid camera is so accurate at determining the head centre location.
(This seems like such a likely / obvious option for the repetability issue that it’s probably been raised before - sorry if I missed it!)
