Job Mark

Tools ▸ Job Mark · ■ Blue · needs a camera

What it does

It engraves a QR code on the blank that says which job that blank is for. Later — next week, next month — you put the blank on the bed, take a photo, and ALPS reads it: this is the Hendricks name badge, here is the job, do you want it loaded?

One mark does two jobs at once. It names the job, and because a QR has three big square patterns in three of its corners, it also shows where the blank is sitting and how far it is turned.

⭐ This is for shops that pre-mark blanks. Cut a hundred anodized plates, mark each with its job, stack them. Nobody has to remember which pile was which, and nobody has to hunt through job history to find the right settings — the plate itself carries the answer.

The two directions


Mark a job	Pick a saved job, drop its mark into the open document, engrave it on the blank.
Read a blank	A marked blank is on the bed — find out which job it wants, then load or queue it.

Marking a blank

Save the job first. The mark encodes the job's id, so a job that only exists in the editor has nothing to engrave — you will not find it in the list.
Open Tools ▸ Job Mark ▸ Mark a job and choose it.
Set the size and where on the page it goes. Put it somewhere that will still be readable after the job has run — not under the artwork, not where a clamp lands.
Place the mark in this document. It arrives as ordinary engrave geometry, and goes to the laser exactly like everything else does. There is no separate "send the mark" step.

⚠ Size is the setting that decides whether it works

The panel shows a module pitch — how wide one little square of the QR is — and how many camera pixels that works out to.

A bed camera sees roughly 80 pixels per inch. A QR needs about 3 pixels per square before it reads reliably, so the advisory floor is 0.04″ per module. Below that ALPS warns you, places the mark anyway, and it may simply never read.

⭐ If in doubt, engrave it bigger. The default is 1.5″ square, which clears the floor comfortably for a normal job id. A mark that is too small is not a mark.

Reading a blank

Put the blank on the bed. Anywhere — that is the point.
Capture a bed photo (the camera overlay's Capture chip), or open/drop a photo into the wizard.
Read the mark.

You get one of three answers:

what it says	what happened
This blank is for (job name)	Read cleanly, and this workstation has that job.
Found a QR, but it is not an ALPS job mark	Something else's code — a supplier's product QR, a shipping label. Wrong blank.
No QR found in this photo	Nothing readable. Check focus, glare, and that the mark is fully in frame.

Then Load into the editor or Queue it. Both do exactly what the same buttons on the Jobs screen do — this is not a second copy of the job system.

⭐ It cannot read the wrong job

A QR carries its own error checking. If the mark is too small, too blurred, scratched or half out of frame, it reads as nothing — it does not read as a different job. That is the property that makes this safe to trust: the answer is either right or absent.

The position readout

When ALPS has a saved record of where that mark was originally placed, it also reports:

Moved — how far the blank's mark is from where the mark was authored.
Rotated — how far round it is turned.
Offset X / Y — which way it moved.
Residual — ⭐ the one that matters, exactly as in the Registration Wizard. It says how well the measurement fits. Moved and Rotated tell you what it thinks; residual tells you whether to believe it.

⛔ ALPS reports this. It does not move your artwork. Straighten the blank, or run knowing it sits where it sits. If you want the artwork moved onto measured marks, that is the Registration Wizard.

When position is refused

Identity and position are separate. The job name can be certain while the position is refused — and when that happens, Load and Queue still work, because the job was read correctly.

Position is refused when:

The symbol is not the size the record describes. The mark on the bed is not the one that record was written for — it was re-generated, or the record is stale.
The mark measures the wrong size (outside ±5% of what was recorded). The photo's scale, the bed calibration, or the recorded mark size disagree. Fix that before believing a position.
The three corner patterns do not sit like a rigid square. The photo has perspective or tilt in it. Re-shoot squarely over the bed.

What it will not do yet

⚠ A person still presses START. ALPS can identify the blank, load its job and put it in the queue. It cannot press the button on the machine — that needs hardware ALPS does not have. The chain ends at queued.

⚠ One blank at a time. If two marked blanks are in the photo, ALPS reads one of them and does not tell you the other is there.

⚠ The position numbers have been proven against generated test images, not yet against photographs of real engraved marks. The identity half is solid — that is QR's own error checking, not ours. The distances and angles are honest arithmetic that has not yet met a real lens, a real burn edge, or glare on a real anodized plate. Treat them as a good indication, and check the residual.