eufyMake E1 Zero Point Alignment: Stop Ruining Your Prints

The coolest feature on the Eufy Make E1 isn't the camera. I know the camera is super impressive, but the feature that's going to save you the most time and money, especially when you're running large batches or at a craft show, is zero point alignment. And almost nobody is talking about it. But today, we're going to fix that. What is up? Welcome back. We know you love to do it, build it, and make it. And we're here to help you sell it. Today, we're going in deep on one of the most underused features of the Eufy Make E1, zero point alignment. We're going to show you what it is, when to use it, and a step by step setup so you can print faster, more accurately, and stop wasting ink on reprints. All right, let's start with what's actually happening when you use your Eufy Make E1 normally. The machine has an onboard camera system. So when you place your item on the bed, the camera scans it, the dual lasers measure the height, and it positions your design right over top of the item. For a single custom piece, right in the middle of the bed, the camera is great. This is genuinely impressive technology. But here's where it starts to cost you when you're doing batches. Right. Say you're doing 20 keychains or 30 magnets or a full run of coasters for a wholesale order. Every single item, the camera has to scan, take a picture, and reposition. And that time starts to add up. And at a craft show, every second that that camera is scanning is another second that you have to stand and make awkward conversation with somebody waiting for those items. And we've seen people turn around and leave and lose sales. Well, the booth gets slow. People don't want to wait around. So zero point alignment bypasses the camera entirely. You're using math to tell your machine exactly where those prints need to be. There is no scanning, no waiting. You just get right to printing. Now, and here's something else that we noticed. Garrett actually caught it when you're printing a lot of items towards the edges of your bed. Right. The camera does have a fisheye to it. So as you get to the outer edges of your bed, it could be up to two to four millimeters off, which is fine for most projects. But if you're doing something precise like Christmas ornament or personalized ornament or something that needs to be precise and it's off, even just a little bit is going to look wonky and you just ruin the product and you ruin the print. Yeah, you don't want to believe those lion fish eyes. So zero point alignment, especially with the jig, eliminates all of that. It's going to print exactly where it needs to be every single time. Now, this isn't an either or kind of thing. You're still going to use both. You are going to continue to use your camera, especially if you're doing one off items, if you're just doing one phone case or one irregular shaped item and you want to print on something custom, you're going to need that camera to know exactly where you're lining things up. But if you're doing jigs or batches, you're going to want to use a zero point alignment that's going to make you print your batching process a whole lot faster and save you tons of time so that a camera isn't always scanning. Minutes or hours. Zero point alignment actually refers to zero zero on your bed or home, indicated by this little green square at the bottom right of the bed. All right. So this is zero zero. If you're familiar with laser engraving or anything, this is your home. So technically, we can bypass the camera right now. No jig. I have a square piece of product or item piece. I could put this right in the corner at zero zero. And if I have an image that's also the same size in the software, I could put it zero zero, skip the camera and print right now. The problem comes when I try to batch them out. I start to try to guess where these things are on my bed or I've seen people try to read the coordinates on the bed where they put it. I put it here at 20 right here. That's not going to work. This is where a jig comes in. There are two types of jigs. There's like the physical jig. That's this guy. It's where they have slots and I can actually put my products into these holes. I slide them right in these slots. There's no moving around. Or there's like the ink jig where you can print right on the bed or pro tip. You could print on some acetate. Just line this up zero zero. Print your items or your design right here on the acetate. Then you can place your items where you know the where you know the images will be. And then print again. And why this is a jig is because when I'm done with my prints, I can peel it off, file it away and bring it back later. Put it back into zero zero and I can run those same prints one more time. Pro tip, you're going to want to write on that jig so you remember what it is. But file them away and it'll be easy enough to reopen that print job. Put this back on the bed, place your items and go. There's no reprinting the outline directly on the bed. You can do that. But if you're looking to go fast and quick, print it on something and save it. You're going to do it more than three times. Might as well jig it out. Now let's show you how to set this up step by step. So step one, we're going to set up our cut and print files. Now we're going to be using Adobe Illustrator because that's what we use on a regular basis. But you can really do this in any graphics program. You can even do this in Canva. It's the same process. Here we are in Illustrator. I already have my template laid out and this is my jig. So this outer box is the jig and this is the size of the EufyMake large bed. And the first thing we're going to do is set the jig size and the image size to make sure they're the same size. So we're going to go to artboard, fit to selected art. Now my jig and my image are the same size. And that was 13 by 16.5. I'm going to make sure my print layer is selected and we're going to drag in the logo. Here's my logo. Let's size this down to 0.75. That's the print area on top of the golf ball. I'm going to zoom in, make sure it's placed in there. I'll grab both of these and then I'll just select this outer piece again. And I'll make sure it's aligned center, aligned center. All right, looks pretty good in there. I could probably go a little bit bigger. All right, I like that right there. Now, just something to keep in mind or pro tip here, we are using 0.75 by 0.75 because anything past the red area is where the golf ball starts to arch and the distance between the print head and the substrate or the edges of the golf ball starts to increase because it is arched that way and the image will look fuzzy. So we're going to try and keep, if you're doing golf balls, you kind of want to keep your image in that 0.75 area to just print on the top before it starts to get fuzzy. Now that we have our logos all laid out, I don't need to cut all these holes. I'm going to get rid of some of them. I will keep the jigs. I might add some more later. But this is my, this is my file now. This is my print file and my cut file. So we're going to hide the jig layer. This is my cut layer. Now I'm just left with my images and we're going to go export as and we're going to do a PNG and this is jamboree golf balls. And we want to make sure, oh, that's right. This is the print, print. This is my PNG. I'm going to make sure I have use artboard selected. That way it will export the size of my artboard. My image, no matter what's inside, it will be the size of my artboard, which is the size of the UP make bed. Now I'm going to hide the print layer and we'll bring back my jig layer and we'll say file export as, and we're going to go back to the SVG, SVG. Now I'm not going to select use artboards. I'm going to leave that unchecked. We'll export it. I'll make sure that all my defaults are left the same and we'll say, okay, I'm going to head over and cut out the jig and we'll meet Kim over in the UP make software. Step two, we're going to set up our print file inside the UP make software. Inside the UP make software, we're going to start a new project. We're going to hit the little plus sign here. And the first thing that we're going to do is go ahead and let this know that we're going to use zero point alignment. You do not want to set up your image, change it to zero point, and then have it change the bed size or change the view here. Yeah, you can see that it will change the bed slightly. So the bed changes. And now we'll import our image. Yeah. Now let's import our image. Now you can see here that the size of our image is the size of the bed. You can see the green square on the outline and we're going to want to make sure that our image is in the bottom right corner of the bed. So we can use these alignment tools in the top right, far right, align right, align bottom. And that is it. Now we're going to print. Now we are going to say flat because essentially I am printing on a flat surface. I am, I am not using any kind of a rotary device or we're not trying to get anything to turn. So we want the EufyMake to measure the top of the golf balls. It's just a really tall flat surface. And it does take some time to measure. It takes about 90 seconds, but that is a way less time than it takes the camera to take a picture of all the items and replace everything. Step four, always do a test print. So Garrett actually got a little bit clever with his jig here. I kept the holes inside my little donut holes. I kept them inside with some tabs so that my first test print is actually printing on the jig and I'm not wasting any material. Now I could just pop all of these out and use it as my jig. It should print correctly, but we really wanted to make sure before I test printed on a bunch of golf balls that it was going to be in the center of this little tiny hole, this 0.75 inch hole that we have on here. He also did a score line where the full size golf ball is so that we know we've got that spacing correct. So everything is there and I'm confident now that it's going to print correctly. I wanted to be able to put each ball down without hitting it with my big fat fingers. So I tried to leave myself enough room. Step four, lock them in, load them up and run it. Now that we have our jig and we know all of our alignment is perfect, we can do our test print, our actual print. I think the hardest part of this process is actually lining this up along these dotted edges to make sure it's square. So I actually have a jig for my jig. I'm going to snap it in the corner, make sure my jig is snug up against my jig and I'm good to go. Now we will have this file on our website, so you can join us over at kngmakeit.com where you can download the jig file. While I'm here and I'm talking about the website, you can also join our Maker Place community where we have SVGs and lots of other files that we offer. So Garrett's just going to load up all the golf balls so we can start our print. If you're enjoying this video or finding this information helpful, go ahead and hit that like button. It helps us out. It also lets us know that this is the type of information we need to be providing. If you're not yet subscribed, subscribe and tick that bell to be notified of our new videos each week. And that's it. You're done with setup. Now, every single time we want to print golf balls, we'll load the same jig and we'll be able to do that and say zero point alignment. We do not have to set up this file again. A lesson learned. The measuring started in the middle of the bed, so we had to put some of the golf balls or products in the middle of the bed so that the laser beam would hit it first before it started raising up too high. But the print on these looks amazing. I love the logo. I think it's the perfect size for this golf ball. It's clear. It's very visible. This is our K&G Jamboree logo, so it's going to be perfect for a little game that we're going to have at the Jamboree. Now, let me save you some frustration before it happens. There are three main reasons why zero point alignment might fail. Issue number one, your jig move. Maybe you bumped it. Maybe you didn't put it down right. Who knows? But it never hurts to just go ahead and check to make sure your jig is in the correct location before you start punting. 10 seconds will save you like 10 minutes. At least a headache. Issue number two, you switch substrates without recalibrating. If you move the same jig from eighth inch to quarter inch, you're going to have to readjust that height so that your image is clear on a new higher or lower substrate. Issue number three, your design and the software move. Maybe you bumped it, hit the spacebar, accidentally hit enter. Something might have shifted. Make sure it's still in the bottom right. Pro tip, acetate is your friend. I love this stuff. It's an easy way to do some testing without ruining your products. Right. We already talked about using the acetate sheets as a jig. You can also use them to test print on high end items. So if you're going to put something down, you can lay this clear sheet, have it print on top and you know you've got perfect placement. Or if you're using somebody else's item and you only have one shot, use a clear sheet of acetate. Print on that first and let's see where it is before we go in and print directly on somebody's item. Now let's talk money. This isn't just a technical feature that we've shown you, this zero point alignment. It is a business decision. The camera is great. I've said it before. The camera is great for one off items, unique items, things that might be a unique shape. But the jig is where you're going to make the money. We said that this is great for low volume, high profit. So something like a keychain where you're all in for 80 cents is great. But if you had to do like 30 of them and it would scan each one of those keychains and take a picture of the bed and do all the alignment. I mean, what are you looking at? 30 minutes? You're not making any money that way. That's a minute of keychain. With a jig, it's 90 seconds and you're printing. You swap them out. 90 seconds later, you're printing again. And that way you could pump out 60 and about the same time it would take you to pump out 30 using the camera. We did 12 golf balls here and I would say this took us about. 10 minutes. 10 minutes for 12 golf balls. So scale that to something like keychains or coasters or something where you're going to want to print and personalize maybe right at a show. You can do that and you can do that quickly using the Zero Point Alignment. Well, I'm about out of time. I got to go print a whole bunch more golf balls. You have to go test out your Zero Point Alignment. And a big thanks to the Make It Mafia. That is the best mafia. It's all about the family. Over in our Make Your Place area on our website at kngmakeit.com, you can find all the info on our membership. Yep, you get free SVGs, monthly Zoom calls, extra content. But it's really about the family and the community. Like I said, that is the best of mafia. And I know you're gonna get mad, but. I'll just move away from that a bit. Oh my God. I'll just be over here. I'm sure the camera can't even see you juggling golf balls and dropping them. I had three. I had to deal with it. Been a while. Wow.