MakerGear Forum

willnewton wrote:Swbluto, nice to see a fellow endless-sphere member!

Most of your questions could be answered in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R3mMUsHFvU

Woah, heyya buddy! Nice to see you here.

I was into ebikes about 3 years ago. It's an industry that has a prime need for 3d printers given all the inventing that it necessitates to solve its most pressing problems. (i.e., things like custom handlebar harnesses for the watt-display known as the Cycle Analyst.) [Honestly, I think it has a greater need for CNC machines, but alas, only one of the members has the financial wherewithal and time available(Retirement) to support that hobby.]

One of the dreams I had for 3d printing is creating an aerodynamic skin that could increase the aerodynamic coefficient of a standard car / vehicle. If I could create such a skin for my recumbent, I could possibly get the equivalent to ~2000-3000 mpg. (It currently only gets the equivalent to 1500mpg. My Honda Insight only gets around 60 mpg, piss-poor. It has the coefficient of drag part down, but it simply has nothing on the former's tiny frontal area in comparison.)

Rsilvers has jumped heavily into ebikes. Here's a PAS wheel replacement he made: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:998307

Ha. That was last month.

https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewt ... =6&t=72448

Now I am heavily into road bikes.

The cutter looks pretty cool. The auto focus and tracing stuff is nice. Not a big fan of anything "cloud" but i can see it is easier than writing software for every phone, tablet, pc out there.

I'm trying to find the "consumable" part. Surely there is going to be something that has to be replaced every x hours for a recurring income. Maybe the "cloud" is going to be a subscription service.

Time will tell.

chad

chad wrote:The cutter looks pretty cool. The auto focus and tracing stuff is nice. Not a big fan of anything "cloud" but i can see it is easier than writing software for every phone, tablet, pc out there.

I'm trying to find the "consumable" part. Surely there is going to be something that has to be replaced every x hours for a recurring income. Maybe the "cloud" is going to be a subscription service.

Time will tell.

chad

I imagine they will sell some cutting files or embossing designs. (I think I saw that option somewhere in the writeup.) And they'll sell sheets of wood, acrylic and whatnot in convenient sizes, with pre-configured settings for those specific materials built into the software. (They'll sell a bunch, too.)

chad wrote:The cutter looks pretty cool. The auto focus and tracing stuff is nice. Not a big fan of anything "cloud" but i can see it is easier than writing software for every phone, tablet, pc out there.

I'm trying to find the "consumable" part. Surely there is going to be something that has to be replaced every x hours for a recurring income. Maybe the "cloud" is going to be a subscription service.

Time will tell.

chad

I imagine they will sell some cutting files or embossing designs. (I think I saw that option somewhere in the writeup.) And they'll sell sheets of wood, acrylic and whatnot in convenient sizes, with pre-configured settings for those specific materials built into the software. (They'll sell a bunch, too.)

This is an interesting device. I took a little time to try to get more information.

I have lots of reservations about "cloud" software so I asked if the unit could be used in a stand alone configuration. Here is the answer from Glowforge support:

Many of Glowforge's coolest features are possible because we are running the software in cloud servers. At some point we'd like to make fully offline printing possible, although it may not have all the features of online printing.

Being the skeptic that I am, I ask them to elaborate, partly because I am curious about what you can do in the "cloud" that you can't do at home. So far, I have not received an answer, but they haven't really had time to respond, yet.

They are not very forth coming about their software, but I did find this quote on the internet. the question was "What happens if Glowforge goes out of business?"

This came up both in person at MakerCon while we demo’d the unit and online, particularly in the lively discussion on Hacker News. Because Glowforge is powered by the cloud, it’s an important question. Long term, we’re working on some cool solutions, but short term, here’s a commitment we’ll make right now: When we launch Glowforge, we’ll also release a copy of the firmware under GPL.

I'm going to wait on this one until more info is available.

here is a good read on reddit from a guy who saw them at maker faire.

https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/com ... post_from/


and another one on a gg i have been in for awhile. there is one guy that posted a few time that builds laser cutters so you get his perspective on it.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... 5H9Zz3THc8

i personally hope it is as good as they claim to be in the end. i think its pretty cool and the cost makes a cutter attainable for many people. although now you have a ton of people using these things that have no idea what they are doing and will get hurt or hurt someone.

lem wrote:a copy of the firmware

Assuming they're not paying the word "firmware" enough for it to mean something entirely different, that's the code running inside the cutter handling command decoding and motion control. I'm certain their firmware will be heavily specialized to work only on their custom hardware and process the output of their fancy cloud software, neither of which they propose to release and without which you'd be firmly wedged.

Right now, you can buy a Chinese cutter, discard its controller, splice in a Lasersaur controller, and be in a better position with a known-good controller that runs stock G-Code on generic hardware. If you regard the cutter as a kit-of-parts requiring some final assembly and finishing (much like Chinese tabletop milling machines), you wouldn't be too disappointed.

In fact, that sounds like a plan...

Honestly, there's no reason why they shouldn't keep the cloud servers running if the business goes down. Servers of that scale only cost like $50/month-$100/month to run.