Fidelity

kerfmaster pin list · Definitions

recordStates what the code does today. Auditable against the code — this is the only type that can go stale.

Content last changed 2026-08-02 — computed from the item itself, not typed.

Vocabulary — Heal stage

1 open question blocks this pin

Q22 When the fidelity search finds no counterpart for a point, how should a deliberately dropped speck report differently from a genuinely lost feature?
Aristide — What the headline number is allowed to mean.

Fidelity = how closely our healed output matches the customer’s TRUE original shape. The single number that answers ‘did we change the part?’

How it’s measured

Take the customer’s TRUE geometry — native arcs/bulges fully expanded, not the faceted junk.
Take our healed result — clean lines + real arcs.
Sample both densely (~every 0.001") and measure the largest gap between them.
That worst gap, in thou, is the fidelity number.

So 0.57 thou means the healed curve never strays more than ~half a thousandth of an inch from where the real edge should be. The laser kerf is ~7 thou, so 0.57 is well inside the beam — invisible on the cut part.

It guards two things at once

Distance — within tolerance of the true shape (the thou number).
Shape honesty — zero fit-induced jogs. A curve can be within tolerance and still carry a kink we introduced; that’s an automatic FAIL even if the thou looks good.

Why it’s the priority. Everything downstream (tabs, leads, nest, G-code) is only as good as the geometry going in. If healing silently reshaped the part, we’d cut the wrong thing perfectly. Fidelity is the proof that input = output before we touch anything else. The PASS/FAIL banner on every comparison board is exactly this: best-fit fidelity in thou vs true source, plus the jog count.

Explained for Aristide 2026-07-24.