I generally think premium is fine as a concept and I’ll be supporting it since my business relies on the Glowforge. I don’t specifically need any of the features (yet). I appreciate that Glowforge incurs a cost every time I turn my Glowforge on - if Glowforge runs out of money and folds I imagine my business will be severely impacted.
I also see that with Premium, Glowforge need to re-evaluate how they engage with Premium customers – we are no longer an after sales support issue but now active paying clients. So @dan says ‘this is just the beginning’ – please involve us!
Specifically create a roadmap, allow people to vote for feature requests (UserVoice or at the very least a separate forum category) – this really should be prioritised now (has been asked on the community quite a few times to no effect) and would be an important step in transparency with the Glowforge community.
My own pet requests (and support said they’d pass the first two on – but I have no way of knowing whether they are being looked at which is a little disheartening (‘why did I bother’):
a) Ability to see the calculated ‘set focus’ height calibration setting for use later with manual focus settings. Set focus slows down my prints but manual focus has been tricky to get right (or at least for me to know if I got it right)
b) Ability to see the number of laser hours used / jobs printed on the Glowforge unit. This would give me an idea of how ‘old’ the unit is and would be useful if you wanted to charge by laser time.
c) Could Premium part pay for a European service center – the thought (and shipping cost) of having to return the unit keeps me awake at night!
What’s continually irritating is the fact that the machine always does an autofocus before every print, even if you have set manual material thickness and focus height.
or scanning when you haven’t moved the material at all (it’s held in place by honeycomb pins). But I understand why it does it (because I opened the lid). It would be nice to override that somehow, if that was possible.
Took me a few days to read through all the comments – but anywho…
Being a hobbyist and occasional user, I originally was not going to sign up for premium as I’ve enjoyed my machine without these added benefits. Then I learned I would be losing my snapmarks unless I signed up (Dan please confirm). Having enjoyed and used snapmarks successfully, it would be difficult going back. They have been extremely useful. If true, I’d reluctantly sign up for this alone.
Other comments:
Basic shapes (line, circle, square) should be included regardless of subscription services. These seem like core functions the Glowforge should have.
A $15 a month fee is steep for a hobbyist and $50 is laughable if not insulting.
In the premium comparison chart or announcement it would have been useful to know about the beta snapmarks if you already have them. It wasn’t until comment #543 I learned I will be losing them.
It would be nice to know about the future premium services the Glowforge team is rolling out. That might help decided signing up now in hopes of using these future upgrades/benefits/features. Then again you might leave us salivating over a steak that turns out to be meatloaf or worse never gets delivered.
@dan It seems after reading through many of the comments giving everyone who goes premium access to the Snapmarks beta while y’all are finalizing, it will tip them over the edge, including myself. That alone, I can justify, even in a beta mode at the moment, knowing y’all will finalize it. I don’t know how many of the new features I would use at the moment.
That’s what easel does from inventables. You can only use the fonts or v-carving from easel pro for 4 days/month without paying the subscription. Apparently a good number of folks manage to work within the 4 days (I’m not that organized)
Snapmarks are one of the features I don’t agree with being “premium”. They are a hack to try and give real alignment because the Glowforge camera alignment has always been unreliable if you need accuracy. Most machines a have a laser dot that you can use for accurate placement, but the Glowforge wasn’t supposed to need that because the cameras were going to be that accurate. What’s next, the pro passthrough alignment since that was also a crowd funding campaign listed feature?
I wonder why did I purchase a glowfart… Without the internet, you don’t have a laser cutter… I am in the Caribbean and I wish someone could afford to buy back the machine from me. waste of my time and money…
Maybe. Maybe not. I have a red dot pointer on the Trotec but use their registration marks all day long because it’s the number one solution to accurate print and cut, and the only solution to correcting a myriad of problems like rotation and scale that can occur with a printer.
I really don’t see how reg marks are a hack; since I was talking about the Trotec Vision that uses reg marks - do you know what the retail cost of that system is? About $5,000. That’s a lot of money for a hack. And, it won’t align your engraves like the Glowforge software will, only your vector cuts.
Snapmarks was never promised, and hadn’t even been conceived of at the time of the crowd funding – it came along later, as an offshoot of the development of the passthrough software. Dan made it clear from the moment it rolled out that it was a beta feature and could go away at any time, and that if it was offered permanently we might have to pay for it.
He’s stated several times already some of them in this thread) that pro passthrough will always be free.
Accurate alignment via camera was promised, but proved to be technically difficult, so snapmarks came about to fix that since the dream of alignment without registration marks never happened. Don’t get me wrong, aligning by camera is great compared to when it was released, but it’s still not reliable.
In regards to the Trotec comment, I have a pro Glowforge, I paid that amount, but now I have to pay extra for basic registration marks. You actually helped illustrate why I have a problem with this. Could you imagine engraving a laptop (a feature in the original advertisement for crowd funding) and having it be slightly misaligned?
That may be your perspective, but it is incorrect.
Snapmarks were strictly to help with developement of the passthrough alignment process, nothing more. They also led to the camera calibration process, which all owners can take advantage of.
Also, with the camera calibration and the set focus tool, you can get excellent visual alignment; mine is now more accurate than I could get even when I had Snapmarks.
That’s what I always did. I hadn’t used my X-Carve in 6 months and when I went back to use it couldn’t find the Easel Pro limited use. Your comment made me check closer. Yep, it’s there for anyone that was an Easel user before 21 July 2020. Thanks. I certainly don’t use it enough for a subscription. Kind of in the same boat for the GF Premium service. Nice to have, but can’t justify the cost for how little I would need it, versus want it.
Actually, there is a workaround that I have used more than Snapmarks as that is keeping the work parallel and Set Focus and Precision placement to precisely place the work. The only extra hassle is having to break up the design so you can work all of it.
@samrcawley , did you ever run the Calibration routine for your machine and use the Set Focus tool?
If not, give that a run…it corrects for a lot of fisheye distortions.
Correct. The Pro Passthrough Alignment software will come with your Pro. It was part of the original design plan for the machine. It will be released to everyone when the Beta on it is done. (But you can sign up for the Beta now if you want to get started using it.)
We were told as they were being developed that SnapMarks were slated for subscription service. They were a separate idea that resulted from the Pro Passthrough software development, and not included in the original design specs.
I also have a Pro, and I will be paying for the SnapMarks through the subscription.
But it sounds like you might not have taken advantage of the Calibration routine or the Passthrough Beta yet. You ought to look into those.
I missed this thread and announcement. Based on what I was seeing in FB user groups I was initially worried and based on how some were talking wondering if I needed to subscribe so take advantage of the basic features promised when I first bought my what is now called a “Pro” in the crowd funding.
I’m sure glad I found this thread because it put my concerns at ease.
I am honestly asking this question: So how are you achieving such accuracy? Is that accuracy only on thin stock or does with work with thick stock where you have to take out the crumbtray?
I am doing everything correctly: calibrate the camera (and the laser hasn’t moved since calibration), set focus before aligning the vector, I have an outline of the shape to help align on the camera, I zoom in to check alignment, I have my wife double check everything and it is still off by .1" which has ruined hours of work to make something ready for engraving. I just need it to accurately work.
