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Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

glowforge.com

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Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#11

Post by uniclaude »

This is outstanding. I want to order one of those lasers now. Not only because I like the product, but also because I want to support companies going this way.

I'm sure this will also help them attract talent. Amidst this patents/walled gardens/copyrights debate, someone saying: "If you buy it, it’s yours – you should be able to do what you want with it." is someone you might want to work with. Privacy advocates feeling scared to be tracked using their laser cutter will also welcome the news favorably.

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#13

Post by tmuir »

This doesn't change the huge red flag that should give prospective customers pause.

The device will still operate only as long as Glowforge's servers stay up. If there are internet outages, or the company goes out of business, the device will no longer function as a laser cutter.

The firmware is a very small piece of the puzzle. The cloud service is being portrayed as doing all of the heavy lifting. That's image processing, CAM, toolpath creation, and motion optimization/lookahead. Once the motion is optimized so that the motion system will move as fast as possible within its acceleration limits, the result is a list of explicit instructions for the motion system and laser. Accelerate at rate A for T seconds. After X steps, pulse the laser at a power level of P.

Thus, the firmware simply processes these instructions, and actuates the motors and lasers. That's not to say the firmware is trivial. But in comparison to the overall codebase, it is a very small chunk of the complete CNC system.

I'm not arguing that Glowforge is under any obligation to open source anything. But this is a fairly small concession that does not address the main concern that most people have voiced, the inability to run the complete system on your local machine.

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#14

Post by dahdum »

This is a great step in the right direction, but I wonder how difficult it may be to actually use considering they've removed so much of normal laser hardware. Anyone know how feasible it will be to control it?

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/20/glowforge-series-a/

How defensible is Glowforge’s laser cutting tech? Shapiro says the key innovation the team has come up with is moving a large number of functions out of the hardware itself and into the cloud. “We have ripped out huge amounts of hardware from the machine — from a typical laser design, and replaced those with software that we run in cloud servers instead of running locally,” he explains.

One example is the motion controller board used on many traditional laser cutters to translate whatever line the person wants cutting or engraving into a series of electrical pulses that choreograph the motor. Instead of using that type of component, which Shapiro says starts at $400, or even using a cheaper alternative controller like an Arduino, the Glowforge uses cloud software to do the grunt work. “We simply send down the ones and zeros for the motor to the machine over the internet which reduces the cost by a factor of 100,” he notes.

“The thing that’s relatively easy to clone is the hardware, although we have some interesting innovations and patents there, but the place where we think we can really add a great deal of value is in the software,” he adds.

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#15

Post by Animats »

tmuir wrote: post #13

This doesn't change the huge red flag that should give prospective customers pause. The device will still operate only as long as Glowforge's servers stay up. If there are internet outages, or the company goes out of business, the device will no longer function as a laser cutter. The firmware is a very small piece of the puzzle. The cloud service is being portrayed as doing all of the heavy lifting. That's image proc…

"The firmware is a very small piece of the puzzle."

Probably right. What's needed is source code escrow for the cloud service, so if Glowforge tanks, the code goes open source.

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#16

Post by fit2rule »

It great that they're open-sourcing the firmware, but its still not great that the product depends on "a cloud" in order to operate. I hope that is one of the very first things that gets addressed by contributors .. as someone who has orbited around some nice laser firmware projects in the past, I'll be interested in their source release and see if I can help in some way .. so, kudo's for the open source! Now lets get rid of that cloud ..

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#17

Post by gohrt »

uniclaude wrote: post #11

This is outstanding. I want to order one of those lasers now. Not only because I like the product, but also because I want to support companies going this way. I'm sure this will also help them attract talent. Amidst this patents/walled gardens/copyrights debate, someone saying: "If you buy it, it’s yours – you should be able to do what you want with it." is someone you might want to work with. Privacy advocates feel…

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10276430

They open source the firmware because the firmware is a dumb client; all the logic that controls the laser (aka makes it not set your house on fire) is hidden in the cloud.

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#18

Post by gohrt »

logn wrote: post #12

Might want to consider Affero GPL. Without that, there's a possibility some competitor comes along, improves the software, puts it behind a cloud-only service, and never publishes the code.

That's... Glowforge's business model. The high-level control logic software is in the cloud.

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#19

Post by sophacles »

tmuir wrote: post #13

This doesn't change the huge red flag that should give prospective customers pause. The device will still operate only as long as Glowforge's servers stay up. If there are internet outages, or the company goes out of business, the device will no longer function as a laser cutter. The firmware is a very small piece of the puzzle. The cloud service is being portrayed as doing all of the heavy lifting. That's image proc…

These folks didn't invent the CNC ecosystem. They didn't even invent the realatively inexpensive laser cutter. If the firmware is GPL, I'm fairly certain plenty of existing toolkits will get drivers for the it in short order.

Re: Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

#20

Post by [deleted] »

gohrt wrote: post #18
logn wrote: post #12

Might want to consider Affero GPL. Without that, there's a possibility some competitor comes along, improves the software, puts it behind a cloud-only service, and never publishes the code.

That's... Glowforge's business model. The high-level control logic software is in the cloud.

[deleted]
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