I think my GF is rebooting - fairly often when I power it on, or when it’s just sitting waiting while I work (e.g. in the GFUI), there’s a blink where the fan and lights stop, then start up again, after which it goes through the usual power-on routine (moving/calibrating, then coming back online).
I just had a print fail mid-way through engraving - a 2 hour job, 30 minutes in and the GF did the same thing - lights went off and back on, then didn’t resume cutting. Waited a half hour and it didn’t resume. Then power cycled and it is back online, but of course the job is gone. GFUI reported an “error printing”.
I hope that GF has more insight into what’s going on. Can they see machine logs? Is there anything that I can do to figure this out?
They can. Mine rebooted a couple of times and the suggestion was to replace it, but it hasn’t happened again. I’m hoping it was a fluke. I’m assuming there’s a watchdog timer, so software bugs in theory could cause that behavior. Support seems to be able to pull enough data to determine whether they think your machine is bad.
There is, but it helps if they know the date, time and time zone that it happened. (Record that here so when they see it they can backtrack and see if anything is going on.)
I’ve looked into this and have a few questions that will help us continue to explore what’s happening:
Do you know the approximate date and time of any of the reboots? Does it happen every time you turn on your Glowforge?
Is your Glowforge plugged directly into the wall outlet? If not, please let us know and plug it directly into the wall
In addition, it looks like you might have trouble with your Wi-Fi connection stability, and I’m wondering if that might be contributing to any of the issues you’re seeing. Could you do the following:
Reduce electronic and Wi-Fi interference
If your unit is near other devices that use Wi-Fi or a large number of electronics, temporarily turn off other electronics and devices in the area.
If you have a smartphone that can create a Wi-Fi Hotspot, let’s see if that works better. Here’s how:
Instruct your phone to create a Wi-Fi hotspot (search the internet for instructions specific to your phone)
Place your phone on top of the right glass panel of the unit
Hold down the Glowforge unit’s button for 10 seconds until it glows teal
This happened to me a couple of times when there were momentary power dips. The GF seems very susceptible to such even when the rest of the electronics in the house weather them OK.
It’s possible - nothing else in the house flickered, that anyone noticed, but it’s possible that a very quick “blip” could affect the GF. I live in Florida, where power outages are not uncommon, though there wasn’t a hurricane, etc ., going on.
It’d be easy enough to pick up a UPS to protect the GF from power “blips” if that would help.
Is your Glowforge plugged directly into the wall outlet?
Yes.
Do you know the approximate date and time of any of the reboots? Does it happen every time you turn on your Glowforge?
It was happening all day December 9th, and occasionally for a few days before that. Since it eventually finished and came online, and the whole startup process seems to take an unpredictably long time, it took me a while to nice the unusual “reboot” during the process. The failure during the print was a bit before 3 PM that day.
I haven’t noticed it happening again the last few days.
In addition, it looks like you might have trouble with your Wi-Fi connection stability, and I’m wondering if that might be contributing to any of the issues you’re seeing. Could you do the following: …
My WiFi is rock solid. I do have some oddness in my internet connection, between my house and the internet, which AT&T has spent a few months not fixing. The behavior I see is that every minute or so internet traffic gets stuck for a second or so, then recovers. This only really affects streaming audio - video buffering and web browsing (over TCP) usually recover after a brief pause. Yeah, sucks. You’d think the company that invented lasers and telecommunications would be better at providing “fiber to the home”. But it’s the same connection the GF has been printing fine over for weeks, and it hasn’t changed that I can tell.
Since printing is behaving fine now, and has for a few days, I can’t really test whether switching to my phone as a hot spot would help - at best it’ll work the same. But next time I start seeing failures, I’ll try it.
It’s been a little while since I’ve seen any replies on this thread. I hope that’s because this problem didn’t reoccur! I’m going to close this topic - if you still need help with this, please either start a new thread or email support@glowforge.com. Thanks!