i love all of his videos so much.
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I didn’t have a career making 3D printers. That was my own business for three years after spending 30 years working for a company that makes gaming machines. Part of that time I was R&D manager and commissioned custom SMPS to my specification and was responsible for getting machines through safety and EMC approvals. I was familiar with the full schematics and discussed them with the design engineers.
Again that diagram doesn’t match a typical multi-output SMPS with PFC. That just looks like just the PFC stage or a single output supply where it can be combined.
After the smoothing you have one or more down converters with their own control loops. For a laser you also have an up convertor which could share the PFC or have its own. Since we were taking about stepper motors losing steps that is irrelevant. With a correctly designed PSU mains RFI and mains harmonic distortion does not effect the output. If it did most digital appliances would be totally unreliable because typical mains in a large building has plenty of noise and harmonic distortion.
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Alright, well, at this point (actually, it was long before this) I’m going to have to agree to disagree.
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Sad thing is, @Tom_A, I’m thinking you just had a really crappy run of luck as far as your two production units go. What you’re seeing obviously isn’t what everyone else is seeing, and as frustrating (not a strong enough word, I know) as that is, I’m sure they will make it right. If support gives you any insight into what’s going on in your machine please share, because, with my normal luck with these things, I’ll probably be following your example 
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I was just thinking about this in statistical terms, and it should be a birthday-problem kind of calculation to figure out what the odds are that someone out of GF’s customer base will run into a string of bad machines. If it’s 1 in 1000 it would happen fairly often.
Yeah… I know. I figured I’d do something I want to do so I went to run off a job last night but ran into a completely unrelated issue. Nobody’s fault on that one. So I’ll try and run it again tonight.
Man, I feel for you. Nothing sucks more than going from super excited and pumped to sub-surface gloom and doom. But, as the most anoying song in the world says, “The sun will come out tomorrow…” (just be glad you can’t hear me singing it 
Or better…
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We ran the numbers to see if repeat-delivery-problems were a statistical anomaly (or if, for example, some people have rough UPS handlers). What we found was that unfortunately, given a fully random distribution of errors, at the volumes we’re now shipping at, it’s more likely than not that some unlucky folks have multiple problems. Right now our models predict folks who have two consecutive broken units… pretty soon we’ll see the first person suffering three. 
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Ouch that must make you very nervous for International Deliveries, the cost burden of multiple failures to OS units would be prohibitive, i am sure the USA only errors must be painful and expensive.
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Okay… Fine… I’ll open a ticket tomorrow. I just don’t want to waste support’s time for a third time until I’m 100% convinced there’s a problem. But okay… I guess there is enough evidence to bring support in on it. Tomorrow for sure. I promise.
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Are the UPS handling issues excluded from being considered “broken”? I know of one person that has had 3 returns but I think the issues were more related to Shipping/Handling.
Our analysis was looking at returns for any reason, since it’s not always possible to differentiate between handling problems and factory problems (although we try).
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“As you can clearly see, I have no regard for safety.”
That was the most cringe-inducing video I’ve seen in a while.
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It might be worth putting insurance on shipping the second one if the first one arrives damaged.
Who are you suggesting for? Glowforge? The customer?
I’d imagine they are all 3rd party insured rather than UPS insured. Quite likely a blanket policy purchased for X number of machines/shipments sold during the pre-order.
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If I were Glowforge, and the data supported it, I would insure it.
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Whrn I did shipping anything over 3 digits to the left of the decimal got insuance. Stingy boss always low balled it and didn’t like when I’d pick random numbers out my butt if I couldn’t get a hold of him and UPS was waiting.
…until the one day a package I’d insured for the full amount vanished in transit. I got an atta’boy that day.
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Maybe. If they do get to shipping a few thousand a month, it may be cheaper to self insure and just use insurance for losing a container full of them all at once (if they did that, which I don’t think they will).
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It never makes sense to insure something you can afford to replace. The insurer will charge more than the risk to make a profit.
I doubt Glowforges will ever by shipped in containers. There aren’t enough going to the same place to fill one. It would take about 1000.
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