Tomorrow we are going over my cousin’s house nearby, and the highlight of their house, is when they renovated it they installed a ginormous dual fired pizza oven (required massive steel supports and a crane to get it into the house through a huge hole in the kitchen outside wall). Anyway, I thought a sign would be nice:
Solid proofgrade maple. Set it all up as 2 levels of engrave, a score and finally a cut.
So first attempt was a pretty spectacular failure. It started off for the cut on the top right corner rounded the corner, paused and then continued on without lasing… (sorry didn’t have my phone out for the first 10 seconds). Then halted all together and turned the button purple…
OK, so I waited a few moments. Nothing happened, so like any good tech person, I rebooted. It recalibrate, and reported ready for duty.
Fired up the same job, and bam, this came out so crisp and clean. At first I thought the dark engrave was too dark, but after weeding just looks sweet. This piece of maple has some interesting ripples in the grain, but the surface is smooth, it just looks like there are bumps
So it seems like you’re having a few more problems than some of the other pre-release users.
Would you chalk that up to user error, others being less vocal about their hiccups or just a build that the GF team knew wasn’t perfect?
Love seeing your work, just found it odd that most times when you post there is a TINY problem before a great print
In fairness, I’ve only had the Glowforge since Wednesday evening! I am also being very diligent in posting everything that I send in to support. Several of the problems were related (the camera being out of focus, which I deliberately didn’t just fix, in case support needed to debug something of the manufacturing process - now fixed) which caused the alignment to be off, etc. Also as someone who does software development, I realize the engineering team can’t know about problems if they aren’t reported. I view being a PR user as partly to learn, but also to make sure that all of our units, including mine, are the best they can be at shipping. So in things in a final unit I might not post on, I post on here, since that is part of the PRU program.
In addition, compared to other maker devices this is nothing… My 3D printers constantly despite being expensive brand name printers still constantly have little (and sometimes big/spectacular) issues, as do my CNC milling machines, etc. That’s just part of devices that make stuff, and I learn from every one of these glitches.
Spot on. Although I’m not bothering to post here everything I let Support know about. For instance I had an issue with a Microsoft Surface RT. I don’t think that’s a use case that is high on the list of “things to worry about” but they are looking into it and have asked for some diagnostic data. I just happened to have an original MS Surface so figured it might make a nice little tablet controller for the GF. Instead I’m using my Surface 3 and that’s fine (I also use that for a lot of design so it actually is a bit more streamlined a workflow than using the RT).
I took a shot at editing the User Manual a bit (especially considering many of the users will be non-native English speakers. But when I bump into something material I’ll let folks know (after Support acknowledges that it’s a real issue and not the dreaded Operator Error )
Exactly what I was thinking!
When I’m developing software I try to break it in every way possible and then if one of our QA folk notice something odd I get them to reproduce with me watching (and the logs running in another window) so I can see exactly what is going on.
Sending even the smallest stuff to support ends up making the final product much better… even if they hate you at the time
Yeah, my workflow is a user reports a problem, a quick check of the log (often these end up being data issues, so the database reports that an item is missing, and we note that a setup script on the last update didn’t get run - grrrr) but after that, I go click on the thing or whatever in dev mode and if it blows up in my face in 20 seconds, then I don’t even bother to get testing involved, and just take the bug on. If not, I put the bug back to testing so they can get a duplicate workflow I can debug against (they are way, way cheaper a resource). Then either way, I fix it, and we test first in debug to make sure it is fixed, then it goes back to the real testing cycle.
But I’ve walked into user meetings and gotten my face torn off about something broken, which about 99% of the time I deflate with “well did you report it?” and suddenly there is dead silence…
Because my company is a POS vendor we often get the “Your system is broken!” from our clients when the majority of the time it is a problem with a system we are integrated to down the line somewhere that they actually manage
I let Support know about anything that doesn’t act as expected, issues, and missing functions that are important to good operation. But am a little more reticent about posting publicly on the forum everything I report to the company. Most of what I report are about things that they are already working or quirks that can be easily fixed with a S/W update. Support hears about all the minor stuff, but you won’t from me.
I’m in no way attempting to gloss over any problems but history has taught me that the forum goes ballistic over such minor crap. If I publicly post everything, some will read a problem as a small bug that needs fixing and others will see the same post as a failed system. I really don’t have much use or time for those with the second personality type.
And then there have been several big failures that I thought were problems with the system but turned out to be my stupidity or caused by me working without any real manual or detailed instructions. It’s all been pretty much “here is a Glowforge unit, let us know if you can figure it out”.
Still pretty pleased with things. If it weren’t for the well known overhead camera alignment QA issue, I would expect these things to be rolling out the door.
Yes, I agree, and I am not posting everything either, but things that caused me to stumble (like little issues with packing materials, etc seem irrelevant) I post.
I agree some people go nuts with little issues, but I guess as someone who works on software as well as the incredibly messy world of human medicine, I realize things are never and never will be perfect, and you just need to learn, improve what you can and move along.
I mean we find bugs routinely in our homegrown EHR, which has been running for many decades; that’s life and the key is find it, reproduce it and fix it, not freak.
Your fine. Just getting off my chest an opinion that frankly there are few in the forum that get off on increasing the melodrama. Spent my entire career doing hands on H/W and S/W testing. So understand how you are approaching it.
Ha yeah. I’ve had mine for a while now and still rattle off a couple pages to support on occasion/ last night. Like @rpegg says, no reason to make a deal over something no one would have seen otherwise. Bugs are bugs.
Some things though are definitely worth sharing to get everyone’s take on it. 0,0 for example is something I think a lot more people will start asking for when they get their machines.
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