Appendices D and E

Appendix D · What each skill level unlocks

ALPS gates 62 features across four levels. You set yours in Settings ▸ General.

⭐ A feature you cannot see is a feature you cannot get wrong. The gating is the teaching, not a restriction — and every level above yours is one click away on the day a job needs it.

● Green — 6 features

Everything needed to run real jobs well: choosing a machine, choosing a material preset, frequency, alignment presets, preview, and send.

⭐ That short list is the point. A Green operator can do the whole loop — artwork in, settings on, part out — without meeting one control they do not yet have a use for.

■ Blue — 32 features

The production tier, and the biggest step up. Cameras and calibration, jigs and fixtures, shape matching and registration, part digitizing and outline review, arrays, booleans, common-line cutting, air assist, cycles, centre engraving, layers.

⭐ Blue is where most working operators settle. If a shop is doing repeat work, this is the level that pays for itself.

◆ Black — 16 features

Accuracy and control: bed self-calibration, pass-through registration, mark verification, focus at a point, numeric alignment, bezier editing, cut quality, feeder mode, hairline thresholds, template import.

◆◆ Expert — 8 features

Technician and developer surface: bed flatness, network diagnostics, the raw PRN editor, firmware, galvo camera alignment and manual calibration, cut direction.

⚠ These are not documented in this manual, deliberately — see the Contents. They are not customer-facing, and a page for a tool you cannot open would be worse than none.

⚠ If a tool this manual describes is not on your screen, your level is below it. That is the commonest cause of "I can't find it", and it is a one-click fix.

Appendix E · Where ALPS keeps your files

Everything ALPS stores lives under one folder, named for the application:

Inside it:

⭐ store/ is the folder that matters. Your serial counters live there, and they are the one thing you genuinely cannot reconstruct — a counter is a fact about what you have already shipped.

⛔ Do not hand-edit these files. Use Settings ▸ Advanced ▸ Backup / restore, which exports preferences, materials, machines, jobs and serial counters to a single file, and knows how to read one back.

⭐ Take a backup before you reinstall, change computers, or upgrade the machine. It takes seconds and it is the difference between moving and starting again.

⚠ A calibration is not portable. It is per machine, stored on the computer that made it, and cross-computer pickup is not yet verified end to end. A second workstation calibrates for itself.

⭐ Report a problem (Settings ▸ Advanced) saves recent logs plus system info as a ZIP — nothing leaves your machine until you send it. That ZIP is the single most useful thing you can attach to a support email.