Hard-wired network connection?

When the GF broadcasts itself as an access point, does that mean my neighbors can take over my GF? This could get really interesting! :slightly_smiling:

It gets really, really interesting when your neighbors play with the kill-kill-kill button in the web interface. :smiling_imp:

They can also print obscene pictures on your wi-fi printers, stream cat videos to your chromecast when all you wanted was a dog video, adjust your thermostat till you have to go buy winter clothes mid summer heat wave, watch your children on the nanny cam, start your car for you. We could be paranoid and you should be protecting all your devices against all those things.

Or we could remember your glowforge wonā€™t do anything until you push the button, so their mischief is pretty limited.

Excellent point @ihermit2 - Stratasys learned that same lesson when deploying their FDM printers into high-school shop classes - a responsible ā€œadultā€ must be present to push the start-print button, to screen against the students printing inappropriate items.

Iā€™m hoping the web client for the GF can upload jobs to the GF and nothing else - both starting and stopping should be controlled by the big white button. That will prevent the GF from starting unattended, and being messed with during the job.

One of the stated benefits of a wired network is higher speed, but I suspect most (future) owners will be limited by the speed of their WAN connection. My local WiFi speed is around 50Mbps, but my WAN connection is only 30Mbps. Latency can be much worse through WiFi, but thatā€™s generally only a concern for gaming.

The biggest unknown for me, is what throughput GF is going to pay for when sending job files to the machine. For example, Steamā€™s file servers deliver data at 4-5MB/s (thatā€™s bytes, not bits). Elsewhere in these forums I read an estimate for a large job potentially running up to 100MB - that could take over 20 minutes from when you tell the web client to proceed, and the machine fully buffering the job. You may be able to start the job while itā€™s still downloading, but then you have to do a risk assessment to decide if you can tolerate an interruption in the download.

I think your math is a bit off hereā€¦ 4-5MB/s for 100MB means 20 seconds, not minutesā€¦

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Whoops! and whew!! thank you @takitus for catching that!

Never mindā€¦

Technically, the web client only communicates with the cloud servers, which then turn your design into low-level machine instructions, and then the cloud servers send those to the machine. Once the wi-fi setup is done and working, you donā€™t need to connect directly to the Glowforge again, other than to redo the set up with new Wi-Fi details if you move etc.