Can’t wait to see some of your designs. 
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It may have been close to a novel, but it was worth the read. While I fully agree with the get ready early, I’m not sure how good I will be with that. I am starting to dabble with some of the design software right now, though I need to start with Free and possible move from there.
All your posts from PRU have left me eager and totally looking forward to a production unit. Maybe I will borrow a page from @ian and try my hand and designing some kind of tray puzzles to see how it goes.
I especially love your analysis of where things are going. From what I’ve seen, I would expect production units to ship if the hardware production was resolved and they still had software tweaks and features to release. Dan has pretty much committed to that idea that units will ship while features are still being added to the software. I am just left VERY eager waiting for it.
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I’m actually thinking right now of a tray puzzle with isometric cubes making a cube puzzle. We will see.
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These are both thoughtful and fair assessments of the stage & challenges we’re at. (Yes, the resin thing hit us too - fortunately Flex has the muscle to push through these sorts of problems)
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Me too! It gets harder to contain my excitement with every passing day. In addition to daily forum checks looking for every little progress report, I have started checking my email every few days too. I abhor email and I don’t really expect one from GF for a few months, but I’d hate to delay my shipping even a few days becasue I wasn’t diligent. I firmly believe one day soon I will open that email and find the glowing ticket!
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Probably part of my inspiration, but thinking something different. Since I have trouble visualizing, the concept I’m trying to reach may not actually be possible. I will see when I get there.
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My wife and I bought a 3d printer a couple of years back. We decided to save money and have a “learning experience” so we bought a kit Prusa that we put together ourselves. It cost less than a third of what an Ultimaker of a similar spec would.
Fast forward to now.
I know a ton more about 3d printing, but I know even more about the problems of tolerances, build quality, troubleshooting, etc.
That’s the main reason we decided to go Glowforge. We could have gotten a cheaper laser that someone put into a kit, could have tried to make our own, whatever. But after spending months trying to print a cube to the correct tolerances, we weren’t up for that again.
From what we’ve seen from the PRUs, the Glowforge in its current state would do the jobs we bought it for. More than that is gravy. If they can make these PRUs, they can make enough for us all. Like any product (look at makerbot, ultimaker, etc) it’ll get better over time almost guaranteed.
My trepidation has been relieved because at this point there’s units that work out there. Either that or this is the highest-production-value hoax that I’ve ever seen. I don’t think that’s likely, as there are simpler legal ways to take people’s cash.
I guess all this was to say that I’m really excited, I don’t mind waiting, and if the machine I eventually get “only” has the features that are currently in the PRUs, I will be giddy as I make projects I could only dream about before this company.
Ramble over.
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Welcome to the Ramblers club.
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Well maybe not that one… * cough* Extruder V5 * cough*
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I have the exact same story. Bought a 3d printer kit, learned a lot, but also learned the value of just buying something that works out of the box.
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Yeah, the 5 came immediately to mind when so many angry and flipped out customers were screaming at GF to push something out the door last year around April, and again in December.
It was scary. 
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The latest smart extruder for my Z18 (yes, I did have 3 fail) is working pretty nicely, but it was frustrating for awhile there. My Replicator 2 was far outperforming it…
OUCH. That I did not know about. Good thing I qualified with an ‘almost.’ 
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This sound so familiar.
I bought a Thing-O-Matic kit a year before they stopped supporting it. By the time I assembled it, the software was out-of-date, upgrading the firmware was difficult, not to mention calibration, which I never was able to do properly. Many weeks (months?) of time spent and still not a satisfactory print. Dozen of test cubes and other things that look like shredded wheat.
I believe that it was not a complete failure. I learned many useful things, and more about Python than I ever cared to know.
I don’t mind learning thing that are outside of my expertise, but there are limits to my time and interests. I would rather get something that works right out of the box, and that has many others trying to figure it out at the same time, so that there is enough support to fill in gaps in my knowledge.
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That would be me buying the Cupcake on clearance sale. I got it working reasonably well, but when I gave it to the kids’ library in town (who should probably junk it now) I also gave them the computer it ran with, because it only runs with a few versions of the software, and those versions stop running if you upgrade the operating system…
I am much happier with the idea of something that is as close as possible to. just. working.
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BTW, production units are shipping! Check out the new topics!
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And at least on the Chinese laser I have never under estimate to use of lay out templates for repeatability and as stated learn/acquire several design programs AutoCAD, CorelDraw, Photoshop, Etc and there is no telling were your ideas/designs could grow to be or for that matter you may figure out how to do something new if these design programs that some one else maybe trying to figure out that you could pass on.
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Exactly.
Just wondering, shouldn’t we be getting a June update soon @dan ? I have been reading cool stuff on the forum and saw topics about production units going out, seems like lots is going on.
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