Workspace and origin
Confirm your bed dimensions and which corner is workspace origin. Get this right once and every job lines up.
The bed dimensions in your machine profile decide what fits, and the workspace origin (the corner the machine treats as 0,0) decides how the design maps to the bed. Both need to match your physical machine.
What you need
- The machine connected.
- A tape measure or calipers if you want to verify dimensions.
Steps
1. Confirm bed dimensions
- Open Device Settings → Machine.
- Note Bed Width and Bed Height.
Their unit labels and the values you enter follow the current Display Unit preference (millimeters or inches). Machine profiles store the dimensions internally in millimeters.
These dimensions should match your machine's usable work area, not its physical frame. For most machines the work area is slightly smaller than the frame (because of belts, end stops, head profile).
2. Confirm workspace origin direction
- Same Machine tab. Look at Origin: Bottom Left or Top Left.
How to tell which is right:
- After homing, where does the head end up? If at the front-left corner of the bed, the origin is Bottom Left (most diode and gantry lasers).
- If at the back-left corner, it is Top Left (some CO2 lasers).
Wrong origin direction produces vertically-mirrored output.
3. Save the profile
Click Save. The setting persists for the active profile.
4. Test with a frame
- Place a piece of scrap material on the bed where you expect it to be.
- Draw a rectangle on the canvas the size of the scrap.
- In Laser Control, set Start From: Absolute Coords.
- Click Frame.
The head should walk around the rectangle on the canvas, landing exactly on the perimeter of the scrap. If it lands somewhere else, the bed dimensions or origin direction is wrong.
Job origin vs workspace origin
These are different. The workspace origin is set once per machine, by homing. The job origin changes per project, in Laser Control's Start From dropdown, and decides where the design lands on the bed (or where the laser starts firing relative to the head's current position).
See Job origin vs workspace origin for the deep dive.
If artwork is outside the workspace
Preview, framing, or job preparation stops when any output geometry extends beyond the configured workspace. In v0.1.11 and later, the message:
- Names and selects the offending object when Beam Bench can identify it.
- Names the left, right, top, or bottom edge involved.
- Reports the largest overrun on that edge in your selected display unit.
Move or resize the selected object until all of its output geometry is inside the workspace, then try again. Check strokes, raster overscan, offsets, and rotated geometry if the visible object appears close to the edge.
Do not increase the profile's bed dimensions merely to silence the error. The dimensions must continue to match the machine's real usable travel.
Verify it worked
- Framing walks the head around the design's bounds, on the material, not off the bed.
- The Move panel's jog directions move the head the way you expect, and framing lands on the material in Absolute Coords mode.
- A test cut lands where the canvas said it would.