Registration Wizard

Tools ▸ Registration Wizard · ■ Blue · needs a camera

What it does

It works out where something already is — a flipped sheet, a part that came back for a second pass, a jig dropped anywhere on the bed — and moves your artwork onto it.

Measured by camera, not eyeballed, and it refuses rather than guesses when the measurement is not good enough.

The three jobs it does

① Engrave, flip, register side 2 against the same marks ② A part that came back — restore pass 1's exact frame ③ Drop a jig anywhere and MEASURE it, instead of placing it precisely

⭐ The idea underneath all three is the same, and it is worth saying out loud: stop trying to put the material in the right place. Put it down, and measure where it went. Every minute spent nudging a sheet against a ruler is a minute spent doing badly what a camera does well.

Step by step

1. Put the material or jig on the bed. Roughly is fine — that is the point.
2. Open Tools ▸ Registration Wizard and choose the mode.
3. Capture a reference photo. (Until you do: No reference photo yet.)
4. Point it at the marks. Use marks already on this job if your artwork contains them; otherwise place fiducials.
5. Let it solve, then Review before applying.
6. Apply.

Reading the solution — the three numbers

Before anything moves, the panel shows what it measured:

• Translation — how far off the material is.
• Rotation — how much it is turned.
• Residual — ⭐ the one that matters. How well the measurement actually fits. Translation and rotation tell you what it is about to do; residual tells you whether to believe it.

⚠ A large residual means the fit is bad, and a bad fit can still produce confident-looking translation and rotation numbers. That is the failure mode to know about: the correction looks plausible and is wrong. If the residual is poor, do not apply it — find out why.

Common causes: a mark obscured or dirty, the material not flat, marks detected in the wrong order, or a mark that is not where the job thinks it is.

⛔ Review before applying, every time

The panel offers the review step deliberately. Use it. Applying a registration moves your entire job; a wrong one puts the whole thing somewhere the material is not, and on a second-pass job that means scrapping a part that already has work in it.

⭐ Refusing is a feature here. If the wizard declines to solve, it has told you something true — the information it needed was not in the photo. Re-shoot it rather than working around it.

Double-sided, in practice

The flip is the part that goes wrong.

• Flip about a known edge, and the same edge every time.
• Keep the registration marks on the material, not on the bed or a jig, or you have measured the bed rather than the part.
• ⚠ Anything asymmetric about the material — a bevel, a protective film on one face only, a taper — changes where the surface sits after the flip. Re-focus after flipping.

Related

• Fixture Maker (fixture-maker.md) — for repeat work, a jig plus Jig frame mode is the fastest combination in ALPS: the jig holds the parts, the camera finds the jig.
• Shape Match (shape-match.md) — many parts found approximately, rather than one measured precisely.
• Bed Camera Calibration (bed-camera-calibration.md) — ⚠ required first. Every number this tool reports comes through the camera calibration; an uncalibrated camera makes all of it meaningless.