Glowforge gets stuck at calibration

Maybe. This is something they need to work on - some kind of “hold on, we’re doing something neat” alert because once there are 10,000 of these in the wild the boards & Support are going to light up when this kind of thing happens without notice.

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100% agree. I know it’s still early days but a maintenance window and/or 24-48 hour warning would be nice. For me this is just a hobby, but in a business this could be critical.

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Ditto. The lack of use is bad enough but not to know why it’s doing what it’s doing ends up having me chase troubleshooting and trial & error attempts to fix it that waste my time and frustrate me when there’s absolutely nothing I can do but I don’t know that. If I knew it was something on their end, I’d just go do something else (I might fume about not getting the job run but I wouldn’t compound that with frustration around doing a bunch of troubleshooting).

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My Glowforge is about 4 to 5 feet from the wifi router. Concerning heat, it was hotter yesterday and I did more cuts without issues.

With other people having the same problem I am thinking this is a Glowforge server problem. Is there an IP we can check if there’s traffic issues using something like a traceroute utility?

For me, using Glowforge is for business, not a hobby.

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They use a very reliable cloud provider, so long term we’ll probably see less downtime from this sort of stuff than you’d have dealing with software locally. Still frustrating.

Glowforge really needs a status page to let us know of server issues, ongoing maintenance, or software upgrades.

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It would also be nice if the machine could indicate it’s having connectivity issues. What I saw last night is that it just sits there. It has no screen, but the fancy light is available.

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Or they could put something on app.glowforge.com to show the status of the machine (including when it last had contact with the machine, if it isn’t currently connected.)

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1K likes given.

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I don’t know if this is related… earlier it was working just fine, but I just turned mine on and it’s doing a weird dance instead of calibrating. Every 10-15 seconds, it jogs a tiny tiny bit toward the top left corner, and the light flashes. Then it sits there for a while and does it again. Been going on for a couple of minutes. Going to try yet another power cycle…

Nope, same thing. Let’s try the positioning the head under the camera trick… yeah, now it seems to be running the standard routine. It’s weird that this startup process is so fragile and nondeterministic. Most things with motors have limit switches and can home themselves quite easily. Glowforge supposedly has 50 space-age sensors but this one thing eludes it.

… and although I said earlier “it seems to be running the standard routine”, it only got as far as positioning the head under the camera and stopped there. Something is definitely f’d up… hopefully server-side and not with my machine. Too bad, I had some creative energy this evening and a brand new pile of cork coasters. Instead, I’ll eat some candy in front of the TV and go to bed early.

EDIT: Aha, I tricked it! It thought I’d given up, so one more power cycle seems to have brought it back to life.

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This morning everything is working. Still don’t know the cause of the calibration getting stuck.

After reading a lot of posts I am wondering if it’s a heat/cooling. I’m wondering if upgrading to the Pro will make a more reliable machine.

Didn’t sound like that. Over temp issues get an orange glowing button and an alert in the UI.

We’ve all had stalled calibration issues though.

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My theory is that (so far, every time fore me) when there is a heat issue, the GFui says “Calibrating”, and seems to get stuck there. So I turn Glow-Zomb off and on again, and the “Calibrating” changes to a “Hey, man, it is hot in here and I’m not going to do any work for you” message. Granted, my temps are usually 83F, so it is pretty warm ;p

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@janebynoe I’m glad it’s working. Please let us know if this happens again!

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