Your material must be less than 0.5” tall with the tray in, or between 1.5” and 2” with the tray out

I printed something on draftboard with the tray in a few minutes ago. I then removed the tray and put a shot glass in my jig in the Glowforge.

Shortly after setting my settings and clicking the Print button, I received the following message: “Your material must be less than 0.5” tall with the tray in, or between 1.5” and 2” with the tray out.”

I’m guessing that means the app now recognizes when the tray has been removed which is handy.

I assumed that message was warning me that, if the tray is removed, I need to set my material height to some number between 1.5" and 2". However, when I did that, the app changed it to .500".

Is that just a general purpose warning message? Do I still need to set my material thickness as if the tray was still in the machine?

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Thickness

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Sorry, I’m not laughing at you I’m laughing at all the meetings (quite a few sadly) where warning messages have been dissected for hours on end.

The correct answer is asking the user how thick (tall) their material is and doing the math in the cloud. It would appear the answer here is the message is informational, nothing has changed in entering material thickness, or distance from laser head to top of material.

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For everyone else reading, just remember the height you enter into the Unknown Materials spot has to be the height from the top of the material to where the top of the tray would have been.

In other words, it has to be a number between 0.01 inches and 0.500 inches.

Looks like it’s going to automatically default to the limit if a number is entered incorrectly there.

All kinds of unpleasing calculations explained in the tutorial: :smile:

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Thanks for the answer @jules, that’s right.

For best results, the top of your material should be between 1.5" and 2" high, measured from the metal plate on the bottom. For objects that are too tall to place on the crumb tray but less than 1.5" tall, you will need to put something laser-compatible underneath your material to raise it up so that your Glowforge can focus on your material.

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