Trotec Training

[Scott Shepherd]

Seems like there's a lot of new Trotec owners out there these days. Here's a clip I did to help explain a common problem you'll most certainly see.

This is a rather long video, but hopefully it explains something that helps someone out there. I'm very sorry for the length of it, but it covers things that need to be seen and explained. There's a LOT more to this than this one video so I'll work on going into more detail once I get some feedback on whether or not this helped anyone.

Once it starts playing, click on the gear in the youtube control panel and change it to HD. It should be recorded at pretty high quality and it best viewed in HD.

Any questions, just ask and I'm sure someone here can answer it!

[Mike Null]

Steve

Well done! First time I've seen hd full screen on you tube.

What did you use for the screen capture?

[Scott Shepherd]

Thanks Mike! Hopefully it'll help someone, or someone will show me something that I had missed.

I'm using QuickTime on my Mac to capture it. It's such an awesome screen capturing tool and it's included in the Mac software. The only issue is that this computer isn't connected to the laser, so I can't demonstrate some of the things I'd like to with the machine connected. I'll either get something to capture that on the PC that runs the machine or I'll drag this thing into the laser room and hook it up at some point.

After I finished that and watched it back, I couldn't help but think that I missed so much stuff that needed to be covered. So many videos are cut into 5 minutes or 8 minutes or so and I can't see how to explain any of this in 5 minutes. It's all tied together and needs to be explained together. I need to make part 2 and 3 just on this one topic soon to tie it all in.

[Tony saunders]

Cool video Scott ... very useful and thanks for taking the time to make and post it

[Bob A Miller]

Thanks Steve.... Just got my training & setup today & watching it in advance helped a lot.

A bit of a challenge unlearning the Gwieke process given I used black for cutting & red for engraving.

Bob

[Don Corbeil]

Thanks Steve, I look forward to going through this again once my speedy 300 is delivered in a couple of weeks.
A quick review of this sort of reminds me of some of the issues I ran into in formatting autoCAD print jobs. Jobs had to be set up precisely to get the project printed in the correct location on a chosen medium. We didn't want to have to run a job twice on expensive sheets of mylar. This will be even more true with engraving...

[donald bugansky]

Nice work Steve!

[Scott Shepherd]

You're welcome guys. I have more coming, so keep coming back to this thread. I've got the follow up of this one coming which will explain more about why some of it works the way it does.

One thing people can often overlook is the reasons things are as they are. It's easy to say "That's not how it should work", only to find out it works that way for a very powerful reason, a reason that gives you a lot of options and control of things that you normally don't have. I'm no master at Job Control X by any means, and believe me, I still learn things all the time. About 2 weeks ago, something hit me and the light bulb finally came on, and it totally changed how I used and viewed some things in there. So it's still very much a learning process for me as well. I think I started using JCX in October of 2012. We were beta testing it at the time so I wasn't able to talk about it, but hopefully I've learned something in that time period that can keep others from having to learn things the slow way.

[Mike Lysov]

Have you checked that you do not have some margins set up for a page in either Corel or Trotec Print driver?
It may be the reason why jobs with exact Trotec table sizes are bigger and do not fit in Job Control.

[Scott Shepherd]

Have you checked that you do not have some margins set up for a page in either Corel or Trotec Print driver?
It may be the reason why jobs with exact Trotec table sizes are bigger and do not fit in Job Control.

Yes, it's just a glitch that's been there from the beginning. Not just me and my setup. The fact that a .001" change makes the difference gives me the idea that the core program is all written in metric and converted over to Standard for the USA market and it's probably a rounding issue in the conversion behind the scenes that's making the .001" make a difference. That's my educated guess.

[Mike Null]

For what it's worth, I concur with Steve.

[Scott Shepherd]

I've got another video uploading at the moment. Not my finest work, but hopefully it'll add to what we discussed in the last video. I'll post it here as soon as it finishes uploading. This time around was filled with computer related glitches during it all, like my mouse buttons not working right, shift keys not working, etc. Sorry about all of that. I have to plug in a mouse with a scroll wheel to make Corel work right on my Mac and it's just not something I use at all, so no matter what I do, it's wrong the first time (oh, and the second time too).

[Scott Shepherd]

Okay folks, here's part 2 of this one. Plenty more videos to come, so check this thread from time to time to see new stuff. We've only just started, so there's a lot to cover in the months to come.

Just like the last one, once you start the video, click the gear, then pick the HD option and it should be good and clear. Very sorry in advance for all the little odd things, like it not picking my laser when it's the default printer, etc. That's the pitfall of doing this through parallels, not on a native Windows PC. But I really like the screen capturing on the Mac, so forgive the little odd things that make me look stupid

[Robert Tepper]

I create my page as 28.6 x 17". I have a Rayjet 300 and do not have job control, but I have never run into a problem using these dimensions.

Robert

[Scott Shepherd]

You can really use what works best for you. For us, we cut a pretty fair amount of acrylic that comes in 4' x 8' sheets. So we put it on the CNC router and cut it down the middle and then into 17" tall pieces. So we end up with 24" x 17" +/- 1/16" a lot of the times, which means we use 24" x 17" as our standard page size in CorelDraw.

I mentioned it in the video, there are many ways to do the same thing and what works for one person might be different for someone else. There's no "One Size Fits All", I can only show what I know and do and why I did it. It might be something you don't use at all, or you might be doing things that I'm not even aware of.