Are there any new beta testers?

Community Support
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Just wondering if there are any new beta testers out there yet? It would be encouraging to get an affirmative to this from @dan even if she/he/they can’t be named yet.

On edit - by new, I mean anyone other than @jkopel.

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If there are, they haven’t been added to the Beta User group.

http://community.glowforge.com/badges/101/beta-user

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We’re only announcing ‘public’ beta testers, and as of today that’s just Josh.

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You chose our token Beta Tester wisely.

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@joe - thanks, I didn’t know about that page. It will bear checking periodically.

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Thanks - is there any chance that GF will let the forum know when/if there are some private beta testers?

It must be a study in restraint to keep so much of what GF is doing under wraps. For that and many other reasons it must be a good thing that and your team have previous startups under your belts.

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Absolutely!
“There is no forward progress without missteps”. Theodore Roosevelt
Failure is a big part of success, they go hand in hand. It is a teaching experience. The fact that the co-founders have all been down that road individually and emerged triumphant is huge.

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And I am still amazed that nobody has doxed the private beta testers, if they really have a Glowforge. Of course, it’s not like you can forget and leave one on the table at bar to be found later. Pretty good cloaking going on here. Or maybe I’m not looking in the right place.

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Indeed but TR was NOT talking about stepper motors! Had he been I’m sure he would have chosen his words more carefully

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I would think the “if” is a gimme ( I’d guess there are quite a few private beta testers out there). But if we knew for sure then they wouldn’t be private anymore…:wink:

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I’m not so sure - where is the harm in confirming that there are one or more private beta testers? The only downside I can see is that @dan could be pestered to provide names or possibly numbers, but those are easy and quick to deal with. To my mind the lack of such a confirmation implies that there aren’t any yet.

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Lol, with the same boilerplate message about he’d rather be working on the Glowforge than giving us updates about the processes all the time.

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I’m kind of concerned if Josh is the only Beta tester. He does nice work but from what I have seen none of it pushes a laser cutter to any kind of extremes in accuracy and will certainly not push the power supply. Your testing should be including difficult and complex commercial type jobs as well. I ordered my Pro to build prototype and production RC jets that I manufacture. These models have a multitude of complex parts that have to interlock together then fly in excess of 200 mph. Now that would be testing this laser cutter.

Please expand your testing to projects that much this unit beyond your design specs.

Cheers Jim Ellis

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At this point in the schedule I’d feel a lot better knowing that there are several beta testers out there actively doing their thing. For me, it’s not important to know who they are or to see their work. The recent Fortune article mentioned beta tester***s*** but print media get details wrong all the time so that didn’t mean much.

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sounds like you should head over and fill out the form to beta test.

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I did and no reply

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well you got my vote. But since i don’t to my knowledge work for Glowforge. I’m jsut goign to have to wish I could see what you would do with it.

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I spent thirty years heading up the advanced technology labs for a global tech company. My concern is that if they have only one beta tester or even several secret ones. I would still be worried. The last delay that I heard was that of changing to another power supply. We delt with hundreds of power supplies from 5 amp to several hundred amps for telecom switches and desktop devices.

Now I’m assuming that this power supply was an off the shelf unit which for this type of product makes perfect sense. Even if an in-house design. This category of PS are quite straight forward and I am quite surprised that it would delay a project by quite a few months. So this leads me to believe that something other than a simple PS is afoot.

Based on the fact that this product is almost a year overdue and will be even longer to market then yes, I’m concerned. I have seen absolutely nothing cut or engraved today that makes this product any better than others.

My reason for ordering a GF up front was that I need the one feature that GF has that I have not seen on any others. That is the capability to draw on a material and have it scan and cut. Unfortunately, the special project that I wanted it for was a prototype RC jet that is very complex in regards to cuts and assembly. The GF scan/cut feature would have saved countless weeks in developing this model. Unfortunately they are so late to market that the project ended up being done the old way with trial and error cutting and fitting of hand made parts. This probably added ten times the cost of a GF.

If the GF ever makes it to market then it would save many businesses a lot of money or at least in my type of operation. So lets not have anymore delays please.

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There have been so many discussions and theories about the power supply issues. As a complete neophyte when it comes to machines like that, I’ve had a challenging time parsing the little information that is available. I have just assumed that while there may be off the shelf components of the power supply, designing as an integrated system with two air sub-systems, cloud-based motor control, variable power of the laser, two cameras, wireless, interior lighting, and the cooling sub-system from scratch is non-trivial. I also wonder how much of this is trying to be as patent un-encumbered as possible. I’d be interested in your take on the difficulty of this design from your experience.

Sure, the hardware engineering must be coming across issues that are giving lots of headaches and continues to block software integration. They may fail at getting it all together. I’m not any more concerned at the moment than I was back in April. Come January 1, 2017 and I don’t have a Glowforge, my attitude will change.

I agree. But I have never expected the end product to be any different from any other laser. I am just assuming that the process of design and execution for the 1/2 price offer I paid is where there is a difference. And even though we have seen some work at MakerFaire, it doesn’t look any more functional than the first marketing videos.

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marmac … Years ago we would more than likely have designed a PS in-house. These days, I would have outsourced to a company that specialized in design and marketing them. If you take a look around you will find numerous laser cutter PS suppliers across the globe.

If this was my product I would definitely look at an OEM product that would exceed my design specs and fit into my chassis then start with a few of them to test.