Glowforge Material Manager

Browser extension that allows users to save and modify their own materials for use in the Glowforge web interface.

This project is not affiliated nor endorsed by Glowforge, Inc.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Please install from the chrome webstore unless you area developer and wish to make changes to the source. If that is the case be sure to correctly set extesion id for your browser in the content.js script.

Install Extension

Managing Materials

When adding a new material it will show up in the Glowforge UI after a few seconds. There is a syncronization indicator in the title that will be yellow after creating or editing any materials and will turn turn green once it has fully synchronized with the Glowforge UI. It typically takes less than 15 seconds for the UI and extension to synchronize.

When removing a material the Glowforge UI will be refreshed, this is currently the only way that a material can be removed from the UI aside from unistallation of the extension.

Adding a Custom Material

When making a custom material you must specify a name for the thickness name, thickness in millimeters, and a name for the material. The thickness name should be an adjective such as thin, thick, medium, or anything that can be used to describe these settings in relation to the material itself. The material name should be a short description of the material that is being created. The thickness should be the thickness of the material that is being created.

Each material requires cut settings. These setting include power, speed, passes, and focal offset. Focal offset is optional and when empty the Glowforge UI will assign a default.

Optional score settings can be added. The Glowforge UI allows for multiple named score settings so you will find an additional name field along with the same power, speed, passes, and focal offset fields that are available for cuts.

Viewing a Custom Material

To view the settings for an existing materials, click on its name and the details will appear on the right.

Editing a Custom Material

Click the edit icon to the right of the custom material to open the material for editing and click update to save the changes.

Removing a Custom Material

Click the minus icon to the right of the custom material. Be careful there is currently no undo or confirmation prompt, the material will be removed immediately.

To verify the settings that you entered are correct in the Glowforge UI. First, select the custom material in the Glowforge UI, choose the Proofgrade option you want such as cut, and then select the manual version. The setting presented should align with those set in the extension.

Settings explained

Power

The power settings in the extension have been designed to align with the precision power in the Glowforge UI. The valid range is 0-100 and that will appear the same in the UI.

To toggle the Full Power setting in the Glowforge UI set the power to 101. To help understand when Full Power will be enabled the Glowforge UI value will be displayed in the label to the left of the Power field.

Speed

There are two different speed ranges, one for cuts/score and another for vector/bitmap engraves. The values that are set for speed in the Material Manager will match those that are displayed in the Glowforge UI.

When choosing a speed for cuts/scores the valid range is 100-500.

When selecting a speed for engraves the valid range is 100-1000.

Please take note when selecting a speed that the Glowforge UI will display and "Unexpected Error has Occurred" message when trying to print with a speed that is outside of the valid ranges.

Passes

Can be set to any positive integer value, the Glowforge UI restricts this to 1, 2, and 3 passes only. Be careful not to set the passes to high.

Focal Offset

This value is optional and the Glowforge UI will select a default if left blank.

** Scan Gap / LPI

What is scan gap? Well as you know, when the laser is in engrave mode it moves (or scans) back and forth horizontally. The literature will refer to this as the X axis. The scan gap is the space between these horizontal lines. It is often described as the distance the laser moves on the Y axis.

In summary the smaller the scan gap the closer together engrave lines will be and the longer it will take to engrave.

For for informaton on Scan Gap please read the follow guide

Below is achart with some scan gap settings for the Glowforge:

Proofgrade Materials

This tool does not allow editing of the Proofgrade settings, it would not be difficult to add this feature it just wansn't my main priority.

Features to be added:

• CSV export

Force Update

The extension will update automatically. However, it can take several hours for that to happen on its own. To force a plugin to update:

• browse to chrome://extensions
• toggle 'Developer mode'
• click the 'Update extensions now' button

Development

This chrome extension is a basic React application with no frills. The project uses yarn as its package manager and as such the install and build process is as follows:

Development dependencies Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install librsvg2-dev libcairo2-dev libjpeg-dev libpango1.0-dev libgif-dev build-essential g++

$ yarn install
$ yarn build

Once you have a successful build of the extension you can manually load it into chrome by opening the chrome://extensions/ tab, enabling developer mode, and loading the upacked extension by selecting the build folder.

This project relies on the fact that the Glowforge UI is a React/q application and makes use of the actions that are available to inject custom materials that may be used.

** Releasing **

Create the package

yarn build
zip -r glowforge-material-manager-0.0.0.zip build/.

Set a material.

window.store.dispatch({ type: "SET_MATERIAL", id: 'Glowforge:35' });

Add a material

window.store.dispatch({ type: "ADD_MATERIAL", material: {} });

Add materials

window.store.dispatch({ type: "ADD_MATERIALS", materials: [] });

If you want to force reset the local storage for the plugin, open up the background.js in chrome developer tools and run the following command. This can be useful when you changed the properties that local storage references or when you just want to quickly force a reset.

chrome.storage.local.clear()

Speed settings:

The min and max cut and score speeds are defined as 100/4000. The min and max engrave speeds are defined as 100/8500.

The maximum speed as defined by constant a.a is 8500. The constant s is defined as 100. The constant o is defined as 1000.

Assumptions:

maxVRSpeed is the maximun speed for vertical ramping.

maxVRSpeed for cuts and scores is 500. maxVRSpeed for engraves is 1000.

const maxMotorSpeed = 8500;
const minUISpeed = 100;
const maxUISpeed = 1000;

function getMaxVRSpeed(minSpeed, maxSpeed) {
    const speedDifference = maxSpeed - minSpeed;
    const uiSpeedRange = maxUISpeed - minUISpeed
    const vrSpeed = speedDifference / maxMotorSpeed * uiSpeedRange + minUISpeed;
    return 100 * Math.round(vrSpeed / 100)
}
function calculateDisplaySpeed(displaySpeed, minSpeed, maxSpeed) {
    const maxVRSpeed = getMaxVRSpeed(minSpeed, maxSpeed) - minUISpeed;
    const speed = (displaySpeed - minSpeed) / (maxSpeed - minSpeed) * maxVRSpeed + minUISpeed;
    return Math.round(speed)
}
function getRealSpeed(displaySpeed, minSpeed, maxSpeed) {
    return (displaySpeed - minSpeed) / (getMaxVRSpeed(minSpeed, maxSpeed) - minUISpeed) * (maxSpeed - minSpeed) + minSpeed
}

// Cuts and Scores
console.log(getRealSpeed(100, 100, 4000));
console.log(getRealSpeed(200, 100, 4000));
console.log(getRealSpeed(300, 100, 4000));
console.log(getRealSpeed(400, 100, 4000));
console.log(getRealSpeed(500, 100, 4000));

console.log(calculateDisplaySpeed(100, 100, 4000));
console.log(calculateDisplaySpeed(200, 100, 4000));
console.log(calculateDisplaySpeed(300, 100, 4000));
console.log(calculateDisplaySpeed(400, 100, 4000));
console.log(calculateDisplaySpeed(500, 100, 4000));

// Engraves
console.log(getRealSpeed(100, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(200, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(300, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(400, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(500, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(600, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(700, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(800, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(900, 100, 8500));
console.log(getRealSpeed(1000, 100, 8500));

Scan Gap Settings:

const MILLIMETERS_IN_INCH = 25.4;
const STEP_SIZE = .01875;
const STANDARD_SCAN_GAP_INCHES = STEP_SIZE / MILLIMETERS_IN_INCH;

function roundToNearest5(linesPerInch) {
  return 5 * Math.round(linesPerInch / 5)
}

function getDisplayLinesPerInch(scanGap) {
  return roundToNearest5(1 / (scanGap * STANDARD_SCAN_GAP_INCHES))
}

function getExactLinesPerInch(scanGap) {
  return Math.round(1 / (scanGap * STANDARD_SCAN_GAP_INCHES))
}

function getSteps(linesPerInch) {
  return Math.round(1 / linesPerInch / STANDARD_SCAN_GAP_INCHES)
}

console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(1));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(2));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(3));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(4));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(5));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(6));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(7));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(8));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(9));
console.log(getExactLinesPerInch(10));

console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(1));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(2));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(3));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(4));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(5));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(6));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(7));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(8));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(9));
console.log(getDisplayLinesPerInch(10));

Data

The data folder contains an up-to-date list of materials that Glowforge has available. You can use jq to query the material list for interesting data. Here are a few interesting filters:

Get all Glowforge Pro Settings

jq '.[].settings[] | select(.tube_type | contains("pro"))' ./data/materials.json | jq -s '.'

Get all Glowforge Basic Settings

jq '.[].settings[] | select(.tube_type | contains("basic"))' ./data/materials.json | jq -s '.'

Get all Glowforge Pro cut settings

jq '.[].settings[] | select(.tube_type | contains("pro"))' ./data/materials.json | jq -s '.' | jq '.[] | [ .description, .cut_setting ]' | jq -s '.'

Branding Guidelines

Logos and branding are supplied by the team at Glowforge more information can be found in this discussion.