So today is kind of a cool day for us in AZ this time of year, only 106 degrees, but the Glowforge sitting in that hot truck all day WILL give you an Amber light when you get her unpacked and setup.
Just a heads up!
I opened the lid with her powered up, and since I always have a pedestal fan blowing, I aimed that at the 'forge. Within 30 minutes it cooled down to 80 degrees ambient in the electronics then it went through the calibration process. She’s good to go, but I have not yet tried running anything.
I had a hell of a time with heat last night. I’d run a job or 2 without the A/C on and they were fine. But then got the temp warning. So I powered him down and turned on the A/C for a little while. 30 minutes later, room was quite cool (don’t have a thermometer in there, but it was the coldest room in the house by far). Still sensed as too hot. Took a solid hour before he’d do anything again.
Hrmm. This is concerning. The PRU we had didn’t display any issues with the ambient temps. in the Office (72~73F in the summer and 74~75F in the winter). But at the time we did not realize that the thermal alerts/actions were disabled (or ignored). I don’t plan on freight training the machine with ops- but we did do a lot of ‘last second’ gifts. And it was nice to be able to quickly fire up AI and whip something up and have the machine on the ready.
Thou, this is pretty early and they can still adjust things. But the thought of not being able to run something when I need it too is like I said, concerning.
Just speculation, but delivered air is cooler than ambient, and having a booster draw air through the machine when it is idle like my setup probably helps.
I really haven’t been hindered much by temps.
I measured it with one of those infrared point and shoot thermometers, so errors withstanding. And now that I’m not a giddy schoogirl and can see straight, I see that the part I was measuring actually was the heat exchanger LOL.
That’s not bad actually. The temp inside the tray area before pulling the unit out of the shipping box was 103 degrees. The heat exchanger was also 103 degrees still after unpacking and like I mentioned in another thread, the density of parts in there held the heat a bit longer. Once I turned my fan on it, which I have blowing constantly anyway, it cooled very quickly. Really by the time I removed all the packaging bits, installed the head, tray, and setup the Wi-Fi, it was cooled down. The temp alert in the app was immediately after connecting then as soon as I turned around to grab a piece of material, it cleared and the unit went into calibration.
So, really the temp alert did not cause me any delays in getting anything running, and I was anticipating it out of curiosity so I was not surprised when I saw it. In fact I think it can be helpful for people to be aware of it and not to freak out when it happens when they pull a new unit out of a hot box.
That’s kind of interesting. The AC here is set on 78 now that we’re into our slightly more humid part of the summer (what Arizona calls their monsoon, LOL) and while the rest of the house seems to hover around 74 degrees, this room still averages 78-80 because it gets radiant heat from the back patio which collects sun all afternoon. It seemed like once the external temp of the heat exchanger hit 80, all was well. Just a few minutes prior at 82, it had an amber alert. Longest project I ran last night though was only 15 minutes so it didnt really push things too hard.
As long as your job loads into the buffer and you manage to hit the print button I’ve not seen the GF stop and give the orange button until the job finishes, but that is with the caveat that I haven’t run anything “large” yet that took more than 30 minutes.
It can be annoying to run a few jobs and get the light and have to turn off and wait (which seems to work faster than leaving on and waiting). No real data at this point.
The problem is minor considering so many people are still waiting for theirs. I’m really enjoying just playing with it still at this point.
I thought so too. I hadn’t experienced quite that until last night. Usually 15 minutes in the A/C and he’s hot to trot. (Poor choice of words… Perhaps “Cool to tool?”) So it got me thinking that whatever sensor is measuring the temperature must have retained the heat from earlier. My takeaway from that was “Next time I think it’s a borderline temperature, I’ll run the A/C immediately, even if it’s currently not reporting too hot.”
It would be very useful to know where the temperature is being sensed but I expect GF will keep that secret like everything else.
If it is the cooling fluid I would expect that to be hard to cool from the outside unless it is circulating. A decent cooling fluid will have a relatively high heat capacity, and if it is inside plastic containers and pipes, fairly well insulated. It is only at the heat exchanger that where it has a an opportunity to cool.
Does the liquid circulate while the machine is idle?
I think Dan said you had to switch it off to get rid of the error but you would think the best way to cool it would be with the liquid circulating and the exhaust fan running.
I’m not sure that is true anymore. As Mike stated his showed orange then went away at start-up, and I’ve seen the color and swear it went away just ignoring the machine for a while.
I haven’t bothered documenting any of it since I’ve only been playing in short time frames and with small jobs. There are a few other things (my machine finally read a sticker on PG the other day!) that I’ve noticed too. I’m going to have to start checking the “updates” page to see what is happening.
Not the case for me. Maybe they updated it before mine landed here? I had the amber light, I had the temp warning in the GUI as shown in the pic… both cleared without a shut down.
Yes, it does. That’s the first thing you notice when you power it up because you hear the gurgling and see all the bubbles flowing across the laser tube until they have a chance to purge out of the system.
Does it do that all the time then when idle? It would seem to make more sense just to run it when the coolant was hotter than ambient. It would also seem a good idea to run the exhaust at a low rate while it was over temperature.
I can only assume the coolant is constantly circulating because it started moving immediately upon power-up, as if it was tied directly into the power supply and not a micro processor control. This has been the case for everyone else from BETA and PRU so far as well.
Once the bubbles have purged out (just a couple minutes at the beginning) there is no visual way to actually tell if it’s flowing, so there is an assumption on that part.
The exhaust fan runs continuously at low rate while idle, with or without temp conditions.
