Section 8 · The camera
If your machine has one, this is the feature that changes how you work.
8.1 What it is for
You stop placing material precisely, and start measuring where it went.
That is the whole idea. Without a camera you line material up against the rulers and hope the artwork lands where you drew it. With a calibrated camera you put the material down roughly, photograph the bed, and place the artwork onto the picture of what is actually there.
⭐ It is faster and more accurate at the same time, which is rare. The minutes spent nudging a sheet square against a ruler were never buying accuracy — they were buying an assumption.
It also enables the tools that depend on knowing where things are: Fixture Maker, Shape Match, Registration Wizard, Part Digitizer and Pass-Through.
8.2 Calibration comes first
⛔ An uncalibrated camera is worse than no camera, because it looks authoritative and is wrong. Every number those tools report comes through the calibration.
⭐⭐ There are two passes, and the second is the one people skip. Pass 1 produces a beautifully aligned overlay on its own, so it looks finished. It cannot be: pass 1 photographs marks the laser made, so it can never see the machine's own marking error. Pass 2 is the only step that checks where the laser actually marks.
A half-finished calibration does not announce itself. See Bed Camera Calibration.
8.3 Working on the bed photo
Capture a photo, and place your artwork on it. What you see is where it will go.
⚠ The photo is a moment, not a live view of truth. If you move the material after capturing, the picture is stale and the placement is wrong. Re-capture after touching anything on the bed.
⚠ Height changes what the camera sees. The camera looks from slightly above, so a tall part's top face does not sit over its footprint in the image. Calibration is for the bed plane; the taller the part, the more the picture disagrees with it. For thick material, trust the measurement less.
⭐ Trustworthy for placement is not the same as trustworthy for dimension. Use the camera to decide where something goes. If a job depends on a size, measure the part with calipers.
8.4 When another computer has the camera
⚠ The laser accepts one camera connection at a time. That is the machine's design, not a limitation ALPS adds.
ALPS announces itself with a trailing dot — THEIRPC. — which is how you tell an ALPS
workstation apart from the Epilog Suite running somewhere.
⛔ Asking for a busy camera takes it, on current firmware, rather than queueing behind whoever has it. So if two people share a machine, coordinate between yourselves. Do not rely on the software to arbitrate, and do not promise a customer that it will.
Share video feed (Settings ▸ Camera) lets other computers watch this machine's bed camera. ⚠ Watching is not controlling — the single-connection rule still applies to control.
If nobody has the camera and it still will not connect, the machine's camera service may need a power cycle.
8.5 Keeping a calibration good
- ⛔ Moving the camera ends the calibration. It is a calibration of where the camera was.
- Knocks count. If the machine has been moved, serviced, or the camera bumped, run it again.
- ⚠ Calibration is per machine and lives on the computer that did it. Cross-computer pickup is not yet verified end to end — do not assume a second workstation inherits it.
⭐ Re-run it if the overlay ever looks slightly off. It costs one plate and a few minutes, and "slightly off" is how a real problem starts.