Has anyone tried coming up with a hack that would allow using Lightburn on a Glowforge? Is it a hardware or software only issue or both? Before someone says it’s impossible, it may be impractical but it’s a relatively minor problem for someone motivated highly enough.
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As far as the software goes, people have used Lightburn to create SVG and PDF that can be used with their Glowforge.
In terms of trying to make the glowforge a standalone laser cutter that can be operated with local files rather than a cloud connection… There was a whole organization called openglow that tried to do that you can still go to their website and read their research.
Spoiler alert: they never solved the problem, and the project is pretty much dead. The archive posts are very interesting but they never solved the reverse engineering problem in any usable way.
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Also I think you may be understating things here. You’ve got a huge user base installed with no doubt some highly motivated technical users and rabid competitors who would love to reverse engineer the glowforge and figure out a way to do what you’re suggesting. Dunning Kruger effect aside, if this were in any way minor it would have been done over the course of the last 7 years.
Just because you can state the goal in simple terms doesn’t mean that it’s a simple problem to solve. That said if you figure out a way I’m sure lots of people would love to hear about it.
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Sure, “relatively minor” if you consider ripping all of the control hardware out and replacing it with something more generic “relatively minor”.
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I was thinking of the problem with funding. If we were all stuck with a paperweight, the incentive to find some kind of solution suddenly takes on a fresh urgency.
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In that situation it would depend on if the firmware was open sourced as promised or not. If so, basic function would be a software only solution. If not, probably back to a replacement motion control system.
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