Manufacturing is a beast. It always has been, always will be. Manufacturing in foreign countries even more so.
While it would be nice to get updates on the spot, we should recognize that this wasn’t a KickStarter. It was a pre-purchase to hit minimum order. Which means they still have to go through all the same things, just without the risk or politics. It’s going to happen, just the “when” is fluid, like all first manufacturing runs.
You don’t get factory assembly line time unless all your parts are ready to go, and since there are so many parts to it, any little thing - like the plastic colour being off - can slow it down. That’s not even including the tooling for all of the moulds and making sure they’re not off by even a micrometer.
I’m a small business owner. I sold my personal laser for this guy. I have a backup. Yes, I would be upset if I had to go searching for another laser that’s twice the cost, but that’s the cost of a business risk. I believed and now, like everyone else, I wait.
Have to admit it would be nice if some of the positive progress was shared. Without discussing, or in any way sharing difficulties, the company could incrementally share small successes. For example we know that some time ago the new custom laser tubes came in and were performing very well. Dan off offhandedly mentioned this in a response to a different question. That’s great news that should have been shared in a broader way. I’m sure there are dozens of other small successes that would go a long way to give a sense of progress. And the company gets to cherry pick appropriate info. I’m probably one of the first to correct people when they go all paranoid in this forum. But have had a lot less to say lately simply because the info we have is getting quite old and things might have changed.
Silence makes me slightly nervous as well, after waiting, waiting, waiting… more than a year past the promised delivery window for an actual Kickstarter project to deliver, with $1250.00+ in limbo. My CNC mill finally arrived today: Creation Station Updates were incredibly far & few and usually whiny in nature. The complaints from people who got theirs earlier, began to pile up, and as time went on, it was clear things were getting worse. There was almost no interaction from the creator. I’m not looking forward to the build, after reading all the horror stories.
So why would I drop $4K on another crowdfunding project? Dan is one hell of a salesman with a great track record. His continual interaction on the forum keeps me confident that we will receive a quality product. Also, it’s a freakin’ laser, at a price I could just manage to scrape together.
I ordered on day 1; it was clear to me that it might not ship until Q2.
To be clear I’m not suggesting the company give us regular updates on how things are going with development. Pretty sure that’s not gonna happen. But little tidbits sharing just the positive progress would go a long ways to keeping the villagers out of the castle. I don’t care if it is something like “Hey, our data compression routines are working better than we had hoped”, or “the shipping box design is getting close”. Regular, vague progress statements are better than nothing.
OK - dashing to pick up my kids in a minute, but a few cool tidbits…
Software is getting much awesomer. Off the top of my head, we now show you ‘dead zones’ so e.g. if you’re rastering at high speed, you leave enough room at the edges for the head to slow down without colliding. We show print status while you’re printing. You can cancel and restart jobs. Buckets of bugfixes.
Oh - and plenty of setbacks, but we’re still on schedule for our ship date. That could always change based on feedback or new problems, but so far, so good. I’ll have more and more detailed updates soon.
I really can’t wait to get my unit, when it ships…i really couldn’t wait. So i bought about 10 4’×8’ sheets of acrylic, had it cut down to 12x20"s, and made arrangements to use another laser here in a couple weeks. I know i may waste some materials trying to use a less featureful cutter. I promise you its just to tide me over. Seeing the progress though, has put a smile on my face, i can’t just erase. Glowforge, you know you’re my #1 /wink
Thank you so much @dan!
That is exactly what we on the waiting list look to feed on.
Excitement renewed!
Reporting the setbacks the team experiences is just as helpful to us, giving us examples of the issues you have to contend with in development of this awesome machine.
"Can you make this not suck?"
The technology has been around for decades, but has progressed little since its inception. The elements Glowforge is encorporating in its design stand to revolutionize the industry and greatly expand the customer base the technology is available to. (As evidenced by my participation)
Lowering the bar from where only those with a technical background and bags of money could participate, to the price point and ease of use Glowforge will provide is what inspired us to throw money in your face.
I think I speak for all of us in expressing appreciation for the small details Regarding development, it helps appease our restless enthusiasm - and thank you for bringing this opportunity within our reach!
I thought about this question for some time. It sounds like you would like the S/W to snap the design to the image of material inside the Glowforge. I find using snapping is very beneficial when using vector or modeling S/W but can’t quite translate that in my head to the practice of actually using the laser cutter. One problem I see is that the shape of the material might be square, circular, oblong, irregular, etc. and the orientation could be arbitrary. What would you snap to? The edge or center of a piece of scrap material is not all that useful. Snapping might get you close to where you want to be but then the fine tuning would need to be done manually. Yes, I know there are likely specialized use case where this capability could save a few seconds in setup. I would think it will be some time before the company can focus on special cases.
That was actually the first thing I thought as well. I would have like center alignment. Even if not from an auto-detected shape, at least allow me to draw a shape and make sure that the text is center aligned to what was drawn. This coaster is the perfect example. I would want to make sure what I was cutting was perfectly aligned.
@rpegg I think @areader154 meant ‘alignment’. I dont think this is a special case however, it would be pretty important to have a way to make sure whatever text or other engravings were centered properly.
This brings up a question for me. Will I be able to “zoom in” on screen to make it as eyeball accurate as possible? I will only have one chance to get it right on some of my projects.
