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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

#51

Post by raisedbyninjas »

sophacles wrote: post #19
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.

CAD/CAM software is not cheap either. When their cloud suite goes dark, you'll have to cobble together your own toolchain.

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

#52

Post by tmuir »

llamataboot wrote: post #50
mratzloff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be so much more friendly to have a functional UI hosted locally on the device and to serve updates and optionally populate additional functionality from the web. If your web offering is good enough, most people would have no problem with this setup; it satisfies everyone's needs. If they don't want it to connect out, they just block external connections from this device.

way more expensive to put all that processing power inside each cutter though

The founder has said it would be on the order of a few hundred dollars, which is less than the cost of any of the add on packages.

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

#53

Post by sophacles »

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #51
sophacles wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CAD/CAM software is not cheap either. When their cloud suite goes dark, you'll have to cobble together your own toolchain.

The maker world already has lots and lots of alternatives for existing laser printers, homebrew things etc. The toolchains are getting more robust by the day - heck the CUPS just added compatibility layers for gcode based "printers" (laser cutters, 3d printers, etc). This simplifies even further the common use case for low-end laser cutters - turning an illustrator or pdf file into a cut device.

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

#54

Post by burnte »

makomk wrote: post #38
burnte wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why "the cloud"? Certainly there's more than enough horsepower on my local PC and enough bandwidth in my USB cable to direct it, or even better, allow my PC to queue up the movement instructions and just hold them in a memory buffer in the cutter. Then I can use it without my internet connection being up.

I think that TechCrunch article makes it quite clear: they're using the cloud to make it harder for people to see what their product is actually doing and clone it. Basically, trying to get their laser cutter to work without access to their cloud service should be as hard as building a new one from scratch, by design, since they claim to have put all the hard parts of their system in the cloud.

I agree, I just wanted him to say it.
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