Wishlist: markings on bed for needle positions.

[theorbtwo]

Just a wishlist item, because putting it in a youtube comment seems likely to get lost. In fact, this has already been a youtube comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFesPhYR8KI&lc=UgzOV1yxL-YZXheN2x14AaABAg Also, hopefully putting it in a github issue will allow me to get it out of my head for a little while so I can think about other things.

This is, IMHO, a minor usability win, which is actually fairly important for a project at this stage:
1: It has a small development cost and deployment cost. This will be a few lines of code in the scad file, and might increase the print time by as much as a few seconds (if you use engraved text rather then getting fancy with multimaterial printing).
2: It has no downside for experienced users.
3: It has some upside for newbies.

However, at the current stage of the project, there are a lot more newbies, and potential newbies, then experienced user, because so far as I know, there is precisely one experienced user.

As I said, this is probably trivial, and I can probably create a PR for it.

[ScarlettSparks]

Thanks for pulling this out of comment purgatory! I agree that this would be a big improvement for relatively low effort/cost.

I see a couple of ways to approach this (and they're not mutually exclusive), but I'm open to ideas:

1. Mark the carriage rests: this allows plenty of room for engraving symbols and/or text at a legible size, and seems to pose a low risk of interfering with needle or carriage movement. The downside is that (especially when connecting lots of needlebeds in between) it may be harder for knitters to visually "connect the dots" than option 2, but it would at least provide some sort of built-in guide for those who want to add their own intermediate reference marks.
2. Mark the needlebeds: this would provide a clearer indicator across the entire working area. However, there's limited real-estate between the needles, so we're probably limited to simple line markings only (a constraint, but not necessarily a bad thing). I also see maybe a greater risk that increased detail around the needle slots could introduce opportunities for artefacts or defects that might interfere with the needle action.

I'm personally leaning towards 1 but I'd love to hear what you think! And a PR is welcome if you feel like taking this on, but no pressure. 😃