I just started an engrave and cut that I spent all day designing that will take 2-1\2 hours plus cooling off time to accomplish and some friends rarely seen call and ask us to go to dinner with them. I rarely leave the house much less have 2+ hour cuts so this is a rare annoyance but I would guess others would have the issue more frequently.
It would be very nice if there was a pause button that the Glowforge would start again where it left off. I suppose as it is supposed to do this in event of a power failure I could just throw the breaker or unplug it but it would be far far better if there was an actual pause button or stop button, or even if the actual button that is not doing any thing else could be a pause if hit once and a cancel if hit again while it is cutting.
Failing that perhaps an explanation why that would not be feasible?
I end up canceling the cut often by lifting the lid but that is definitely a kludge.
I’d love a pause button and a pause action. Pause action would be great to stop a job in the middle and do what you need to do (like a flip) and continue without the overhead of uploading a new job.
Except that it can pause and resume for cooling. So the hard part is done. And that wasn’t trivial because it is blindly outputting 10kHz waveforms, so doesn’t know where it is safe to stop the motion. It does it by turning off the laser and then slowing down the clock, so regardless of how fast it was moving it will end up slow enough to stop dead. Then it has to back up and ramp up the speed to restart.
Making it do the same when the button is pressed can’t be too hard but the rate of at which the software changes is glacial. We are now about a year since production machines started shipping and not much has changed.
Have to admit that I’m wondering whether they have decided to start from scratch on the S/W. It would explain why there have been few incremental updates.
I would much rather known bugs and workarounds than a whole new set lying in wait for our discovery!
No matter how good the basic concepts, you can be sure there are better ones out there, but this is a path well traveled with all the pitfalls having a neon glow, something even a better system will not have much less the time it would take to discover if it even was a better system.
Yeah, that’s one way to look at it, but there are some pretty significant features missing in the software that I would have expected to see in alpha (snap to vertical / horizontal for one example, basic scaling for another). Sometimes it is more sensible to start from scratch than to continue building on a prototype. Good thing for both of us it’s not our job to finish I guess.
The question is how much any problem is either fixible with a slight change or so basic to the path chosen that you have to redo from scratch. I have only once found the latter to be the case in my programming, though my experience is not as complex as is common for most.
Actually the solution was trivial and the problems never reached as high as the hype. The cause was similarly a matter of thoughtlessness on the part of a programmer and not a deep issue with the nature of the path taken.
I was once given random sets of paired 3d points that were endpoints and diameter of pipes the client had as a program to design space frames but his program would have occasionally running into each other and as his program only had points he had trouble seeing if there were collisions.
It was trivial to create cylinders of the diameter called for going from point to point, what was less so was when he wanted the cylinders to be square tubes with the faces vertical and horizontal.
Considering that I heard speculation of the banks closing down completely and the entire nuclear arsenal deploying… yeah, I’ll say not.
The solution may have been “trivial” as you say, but it was an expensive trivial!
Federal estimates set the cost of year 2000 preparations in the U.S. at $100 billion, with 8.4% of that amount spent by the government. But observers’ estimates put the figure much higher – from $150 billion to $225 billion in U.S. government and business expenditures, as estimated by Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group Inc., to International Data Corp.'s (IDC) $320 billion worldwide estimate (article source: computerworld. )
