Glowforge Order of Operation

Do you know that you can tell the Glowforge what steps to do in what order? For example, I prefer to score and engrave first and do cutting last. It’s just my personal preference. The Glowforge dashboard uses the colors of your design to determine the order of operation. If you want your steps done in a specific order, there are two ways you can do this.

Manually: You can reorder the steps by clicking and dragging them like this:

However, if you have a design with a lot of different steps that require different settings (such as detailed engravings, or when you are printing multiple designs at the same time that you have uploaded all into the dashboard for one large print), this can get really messy.

The Glowforge dashboard uses hexidecimal codes to order the steps. Black (#000000) is always first and White (#ffffff) is always last.

There is a lot of great information in the Glowforge Community Forum explaining in detail how to use this. One example is this page where you can find files to upload to whatever design program you use. There is more info here as well. You can make this as simple or as complicated as you want. 😀 I’ve chosen to keep this simple.

If I upload a file to the dashboard with these specific colors, this is what order the Glowforge dashboard places them in:

You can use this list of colors if you would like, or you can make your own palette of colors to use. To keep it simple, choose a bunch of colors in your design software and save them in a palette / swatch. Try to keep the colors different enough that it’s easy to tell them apart. Make squares of each color in a file. Upload that file to Glowforge. Notice the order that it places the colors in? Now just rearrange the squares in your palette to match that order.

This palette meets my needs most of the time. However, the next time I have a complicated print with lots of steps, I may need to revisit this and make a palette with a larger quantity of colors.

Is this all just too much?

If this all sounds like Greek to you, don’t worry! It’s ok. It can get confusing! Here are some simple tips that can help you, regardless of how much you want to learn about color codes. 🙂

1. For any parts of your design that are to be handled the same way, make those parts of the design the same color.
2. The opposite is also true. To make things separated in the dashboard, make things different colors. It doesn’t matter how different they are, as long as they are not the exact same color.
3. A simplified order of colors may be enough to save you time! Try using black for scoring, blue for engraving, and red for cutting.

What questions do you have about how the Glowforge order of operation? I would love to help answer any questions out there. If I don’t know the answer, I love learning new things, so maybe we can learn together!

Drop me a comment and let me know what other things may be helpful to learn about!

Ally