So, the glowforge looks amazing and I may have to buy one (if I ever have scratch again), but⌠Can we stop calling it a printer?
Printing is additive. This cuts, and is subtractive. And frankly I think the glowforge would be more useful than most 3d printers. Can we nip this one in the bud?
To be fair, the title of the post does call it a laser cutter.
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It certainly does, but the first sentence doesnât. And it is a fuckinâ cool enough device to not have to ride the printer hype cycle.
Ars technica visited their hq and has a great writeup. Made me want one even more.
Now, I like The Cloud as much as the next guy, but Iâm unclear on what it gets me in this case.
One uploads an Illustrator file to Google where presumably the file is read and instructions for the cutter are generated which are then downloaded back to my computer and Glowforge. The example in the demo was a pretty small file, but still most of the delay between the upload and and completed download had to have been network latency. Why do I need to have all that Google horsepower to generate the cutting instructions?
While very cool, this seems like a tool that will only work if I have a internet connection when i want to use it. Also this super tool turns into a boat anchor the moment that Glowforgeâs âfree foreverâ pledge becomes inconvenient.
I really want a laser cutter, but not one with such a fragile point of failure.
Spend a few years dealing with your common laser cutter and the features of this particular one willâŚglow. Laser cutter control and software all the worst pieces of shit Iâve seen in 20+ years working in software. They are so horrid I want to erupt bile right now. My hackerspace has an 80 watt laser cutter able to take whole sheets of plywood that regularly makes me want to go to China and find the designers to burn their houses down!
I expect everyone buying a glowforge has wifi at home or in their shop. I certainly do.
Iâve used Epilog Helix cutters at TechShop, and the softwareâs not so bad IMHO. It installs as a Windows print driver, so you can design your cut-paths in any program that will draw vectors, like Illustrator or CorelDraw, and then hit âPrintâ (sorry, @japhroaig!) to send it to the cutter. Iâll admit the print dialog is one of those Windows-style abominations with too many text fields, but for simple jobs you can ignore most of them. As a piece of software it sucks, but itâs not bad enough to detract from the fun of cuttinâ through stuff with lasers like Dr. Goldfinger.
I do tend to agree with @Hank though that having a âcloudâ-based dependency built into the Glowforge is a bummer. Not only is it limiting to what we can print, and a potential device-killer if Glowforge goes under, itâs also an obvious choke-point where they can introduce extra monetization whenever they please â âoh, you want to run more than five jobs a day? Thatâll be an extra $5 per job.â
Epilogs cost about 5x or more of what Chinese laser cutters get so very few people have themâŚ
From http://www.tested.com/tech/548192-going-depth-glowforge-laser-cutter/
[quote]A big fear people may have, is what happens if they canât connect to your Glowforge servers, or if the Glowforge service goes away? What happens if you guys arenât around in five years?
This is something that came up on the first day, loud and clear. We sat down and thought about this. On the one hand, we donât want to split up our development resources to make local clients and standalone server packages. On the other hand, if you bought it, you own it, and you should be able to do whatever you want with it. And if we disappear there should be some fallback plan. So what we decided to do is
open-source, basically publish one version of the firmware under the open source license so people can go mess around with it. If we disappear, they can go modify that and flash it back. Now, the unfortunate thing about that is we have to void the warranty if you do that, because we destroy Glowforges here at an amazing rate when weâre tweaking firmware parameters. Itâs really easy to damage your Glowforge
if youâre playing around with firmware, but itâs not designed as a primary use case, but as a backup. And there are some good solid jumping off points to make it a good standalone G-code driven laser if thatâs
what people need to do.
So that wonât include any of the cloud software, just the firmware to make it compatible with G-code. Is that open source firmware youâll be updating over time?
We havenât decided yet. Weâll publish a reference version because the firmware on there honestly doesnât even understand G-code. Itâs very low level. Itâs not something where you flip a switch in and itâll work offline. But we want to make sure people can get access to configure the Wi-Fi on board and other parameters. Itâll be a framework to get started. We actually do the motion plan in the cloud, so what comes down isnât even G-code.[/quote]
So, worst case, you put community firmware on it and move on.
Well, Iâve lost that war :D. Now I guess it is time to âprintâ some Nori with fail whales (actually thatâs a good ideaâŚ)
For the record, I donât run Windows and donât pay for Coreldraw or Adobe Illustrator, so proprietary Windows solutions are useless to me. Iâm on OS X or Linux machines.
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Iâm in Ohio.
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