Glowforge release

[Doug Griffith]

my lasers can raster engrave virtually anything that's on a computer screen... I just click 'print screen', open any program I want that will display it, paste it, click 'print', choose my laser (can't avoid this! ), click the photo icon, send to the laser...

The problem with this is that it is printing what you see at the screen resolution, not high resolution.

[Gary Hair]

The Glowforge marketing team would be proud of your wordsmithing!

That's one of the finest examples of a backhanded compliment that I have ever seen, right up there with "you don't sweat much, for a fat broad"...

[Dave Sheldrake]

UK buyers have just received emails saying delivery is put back to May 2018 for people who ordered inside the first run (Nov 2015)

Remember a few pages back I said about CE taking 6 months at least.........

why don't GF at least employ somebody that understands lasers and the legalities of shipping them round the world?

[Gary Hair]

why don't GF at least employ somebody that understands lasers and the legalities of shipping them round the world?

Simple - if they had people that were supposed to know those things then they would be considered negligent for the work they have done, as of yet, it's just ignorance...

[Michael Henriksen]

They already spent all the money on "the experience". I sometimes wonder what they have been doing these past two years. The software is still in beta.

[Kev Williams]

my lasers can raster engrave virtually anything that's on a computer screen...
I just click 'print screen', open any program I want that will display it, paste it, click 'print',
choose my laser (can't avoid this! ), click the photo icon, send to the laser..

The problem with this is that it is printing what you see
at the screen resolution, not high resolution.

My point is simply that nothing special is required to engrave what's on a computer screen.

In the middle of typing the above, I found a small 440x440 pixel photo of some flowers, and
imbedded it below my text. I took a screenshot of it, pasted it in Corel Photo-paint, cropped it a bit...
scrshot.jpg

Then I found an old piece of white/blue Romark, it measures 8x5-1/2".
The ONLY rework I did to the screenshot was to resample it down to 5.5" tall
so it would fit the plastic, and hit 'auto adjust', which fixed the contrast a bit.
I hit 'print', picked the LS900, chose 'photo' mode,set the res for 400x400,
100 power and 85 speed. Put the plastic in the middle of the table best I could,
and hit start. This is what i got...
scrshot2.jpg
took maybe 10 minutes from screenshot to finished part...
Is it pretty crappy? Sure, but for a near total no-user input repro that I downsized,
it's at least a step above horrible
--but a new-to-lasers GF owner would probably think it's amazing! Will a GF do this? Hey, I have no clue...
--would higher res have helped? Of course! But my point is, I took a nothing of value screenshot,
put it not Solidworks or AI or CorelDraw or AutoCad or Xara or Photoshop, I just put it in a basic
paint program and ran it.

this all goes back to why I prefer 'print drivers', the fact that I can do the same thing using any source material
that's on any computer with my laser's print driver on it. Proprietary, not so much..

[Doug Griffith]

I get your point but my brain doesn't even go down the road of a resampled screen capture. If it can be vectorized, I vectorize it. Otherwise, it's high resolution that's output at 100% scale factor.

[Bill George]

But a Print Driver interface to your Laser engraver, is not a Screen Shot or Capture. Its a file transfer in case there is some confusion.

[Doug Griffith]

But a Print Driver interface to your Laser engraver, is not a Screen Shot or Capture. Its a file transfer in case there is some confusion.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Kev's process that he just described is in fact a screen capture which is being printed via the print driver.

[Kev Williams]

I get your point but my brain doesn't even go down the road of a resampled screen capture. If it can be vectorized, I vectorize it.

Absolutely! The fact that my sample screenshot engraving is 'crappy' is exactly why! But-- ever try to vectorize a photo of a bunch of roses? You CAN, but once engraved it won't look like a photo, it'll look like graphic art. Which is fine it that's what you're after, and with laser engraving, it's almost always what you're after! Very rarely do I engrave bitmaps. I'm always harping on why I like Casmate so much, it's because it's the absolute best 1-and-done vectorizing program I've ever tried, in spades. It doesn't try to guess what you want, it simply outlines black, very fast, and if the black it's outlining is even just relatively smooth, NO editing is needed.

But sometimes you need to engrave photo art--
The Creek had a photo engraving contest a few years ago, this was my entry:
TheAbyss.jpg
This was NOT from a screenshot, it was from my camera - and I really didn't do a lot of photo prep, just some contrast adjustiing...
the detail in this engraving, which was done on some 1/8" not-laserable Gravoply II, still amazes me.
(in case anyone cares, the full size version: http://www.engraver1.com/pictures/TheAbyss.jpg )
However, maybe 3 times in the 17 years I've been laser engraving has anyone asked for an engraved photo.
So I'm all about vectorizing to be sure!

--but this is a little off-track of the print-driver/GF discussion, ay? -- Fact is, I would find it very hard if not impossible to get anything done around here if each of my machines were tethered to an individual computer and/or software. I have two machines that ARE tethered, and I wish they weren't !

[Bill George]

Correct me if I'm wrong but Kev's process that he just described is in fact a screen capture which is being printed via the print driver.

Yes in Kev's case above its absolutely a screen capture. But a normal Print Driver is just a file headed to the printer out of Corel or whatever program the user is designing in.

[Bill George]

Kev, is Casmate still sold or even on the market?. I see Downloads for it but no info, zero on where to purchase?

[Michael Ramsey]

I suppose the benefit to a print driver is if you are using multiple applications that generate the finished piece of work. Now to speak from my limited knowledge on this, where are you setting the power / speed settings etc? for example if I were using AI and created my piece to cut or raster and I hit print, it sends to the laser. OK. Now do you sit at the laser and define the power and speed? What about tool paths etc?

The bigger functional point for me in my world is an Ethernet connectiion with the ability to eliminate the PC to Laser via USB or 1 to 1 connection. I have multiple pc's that I use.

[Lee DeRaud]

I suppose the benefit to a print driver is if you are using multiple applications that generate the finished piece of work. Now to speak from my limited knowledge on this, where are you setting the power / speed settings etc? for example if I were using AI and created my piece to cut or raster and I hit print, it sends to the laser. OK. Now do you sit at the laser and define the power and speed? What about tool paths etc?

Same as any other printer, e.g. selecting duplexing, multiple copies, or paper source for my Brother laser. I've never seen a print driver that didn't have a dialog box to set printer properties.

[Michael Ramsey]

Same as any other printer, e.g. selecting duplexing, multiple copies, or paper source for my Brother laser. I've never seen a print driver that didn't have a dialog box to set printer properties.

Specific to the printer, yes, I agree but, I don't recall ever seeing one that would have settings based on what is in the specific document / file. Again my limited knowledge here but in rdWorks as an example, you would have a red layer, blue layer and yellow layer each with their respective power and speed settings. Do print drivers for lasers have that in their settings? I want to say no and that the control panel on the laser, in this case the GF, is where the user sets that info. So it kind of seems like yes you remove a software step, sort of.... only to perform that function directly at the laser. Kind of speculating at this point.