Glowforges at conferences (CES and elsewhere)

[jkopel]

That is the washer fluid reservoir for the automatic laser window wipers.
[joke]

[jkopel]

That is a very interesting 3D printing concept! I would love to get one so I can print a full sized tree out of layers of paper.

Seriously though, it is pretty cool, especially since it can print on each layer in full color!

[rpegg]

The sad part is there are likely owners that may not have taken that as a joke. Gonna be a support nightmare when 10,000 of these roll into the hands of some that have never touched a laser or haven’t bothered to investigate the limitations or operations.

[pdobrien]

The pro is the only one that has the opening, but what I’m saying is that just because it looks like it opens doesn’t mean that it does, it could just be a fixed panel that they would replace with the door in the Pro model.

Or I could be completely wrong and they’re demoing a pro

[ihermit2]

It doesn’t look that different than the prototype case mentioned/shown in here:

Glowforge tuchas

Someone asked for a picture of the Glowforge’s hindquarters so I grabbed one as I was headed to a meeting. I realized a bit late that this was one of our early 3d printed cases, not the latest injection mold shots, so basically everything’s out of date and wrong (not to mention chipped, and covered with painters’ tape). But it should give you an idea of the layout, which is basically unchanged. [image]

[karaelena]

Glowforge is a laser cutter for DIY enthusiasts

Little surprised of the light CES news on the forge.

[dan]

We’re not smart. They’re different. We build units of the parts we have on hand, so that one is neither fully pro nor fully basic.

[dan]

Just less ugly… it’s black gaffer’s tape.

[dan]

Fluid reservoir

[pdobrien]

We’re not smart

Well that’s certainly not true . Just means that there’s a good reason for doing it the way you did!

[chevalier_jeanpaul]

Had not seen this posted yet:

http://www.inc.com/graham-winfrey/glowforge-ces-video.html

[morganstanfield]

Write, there were so many inaccuracies in the article that accompanied the video. As a former journalist, I was cringing.

[karaelena]

Yeah. Gems like these.

'...put longer materials into the printer and slide them through on a conveyor belt.'

This made me lol.

[spike]

LOL!

Sadly, today’s journalism is about being first, not being correct.
And anyone with net access thinks they have what it takes by default.

Strange times…

[rbercher]

Here are a few more seconds of video I ran across today from CES:

CES 2016 - 3D Printing, Laser Cutting, Virtual Reality, Holograms & More

[dan]

It was a loud and noisy show. I’m going to give journalists the benefit of the doubt that that’s the reasons for any confusion or mistaken quotes.
Was a lot of fun though!

[gdmccormack]

I was at CES, and braved the wall of people crowding around the (really cramped!) Glowforge booth. I stopped by Friday and Saturday, and alas, the machine on display wasn’t working - despite hearing the machines had been swapped out. .

Kudos to the peeps staffing the booth - they stayed upbeat despite the hardware issues. I was really looking forward to seeing a Glowforge in action - hearing they work or watching a video isn’t the same as seeing it in operation first-hand.

So is there any background on why the machines were down on Friday and Saturday?

[dan]

I am SO SORRY you didn’t get to run a print! That stinks. We cranked out hundreds of prints while I was there (tuesday through friday) but somehow I cursed things by leaving and the team hit problems Friday afternoon and Saturday.

As background, the CES machines were hybrids of oldforges and betaforges. We’ve had guests from other laser companies inspecting our work closely at our last tradeshow, so we decided to hold off on bringing some of our newest innovations to the game. Once again, we were flattered by their attention… repeatedly, up to and including politely asking them to remove their cameras from the inside of our hardware.
Here’s what we found:

• One of the parts holding the carriage squarely to the rails broke in shipping. It was a 3D printed oldforge part, not the production plastics; your 'forge won’t have the same weakness. We brought two GFs, but could only bring one to the show floor, so we had to cannibalize one to salvage the other. If anyone saw me dashing down the Las Vegas strip with a ziploc bag full of carriage parts, now you know why.
• CES has about the worst wifi environment in the world. We expected that and decided it would be a good stress test. Things went well the first few days, but as best we can tell someone switched on something noisy close by during the last two days and connectivity got wretched. We’ll be looking at logs to see how we can improve.
• Our main board hit a problem the last day with some unexpected firmware errors - we’re still investigating that one. It’s likely a firmware bug.

All in all, it was a mixed bag. The bad news is we had some failures. The good news is that while we’re still investigating, it looks like none of the failures has a major design flaw behind it. All in all it’s about where we expected to be at this point.

@gdmccormack, if you make it to Seattle, PM me and I’ll give you a raincheck.

[takitus]

This brings up a little question for me, I know wifi simplifies the production and costs, but what chance is there to purchase an add-on board to allow for a hard-wired connection? Will that ever be a possibility? I keep all my essentials hard-wired to avoid wifi interruption and would like to do the same with the glowforge.

[rpegg]

Would be nice. In the mean time since data throughput doesn’t seem to be an issue I’ll just locate the Glowforge near my wireless router or a cheap wifi extender.