We can’t wait to see many of you at Maker Faire this weekend! I’m attaching a map of the grounds so you can find us. We’ll have a few things going on.
We’ll be tracing your designs on to hardwood squares and engraving them. Same idea as last Maker Faire, but with Proofgrade beta materials. You’re going to love how they look.
Every hour on the hour, we’re going to do a print, lines and materials permitting.
At 1:00 on Saturday, @Shell and I are giving a talk on the big stage. I’m going to pick someone out of the audience and Shell is going to design something for them and print it, from scratch, in 20 minutes!
We can’t wait to see you there. If you come by the booth, ask for @Bailey, @Rita, or I and we’ll try to say hello - at a minimum we’ve got some cool Glowforge-logo sharpies (perfect for tracing) that we’d love to give you!
Oh: and we will be running over the public internet, so things may be slooooooow. Makerfaire has promised us a dedicated drop (we’ll use our own wifi network to avoid congestion) but no promises about print speed. CES was a little hit or miss, but we’ve improved wifi since then and fingers crossed it’ll be better. Conferences are the ultimate wifi stress test.
Also as I know folks are curious, there’s a bunch of stuff we’re not going to show for various reasons, including things like engraving visitors’ phones and macbooks (legal not excited about that), showing the air filter (final plastics aren’t ready), and showing the Pro (can’t show a Class 4 laser in public). I don’t think we’ll have time to show high-res engraving and will have to stick to draft mode, but we might be able to squeeze in something small and high res during the hourly demos. 1.3k lines per inch is pretty sweeeet.
Wow that sounds pretty exciting! Anyone videoing the talk? Some of us can only be there in spirit.
Either way, you lucky few that are going, shoot us some lasering footage if you can! Have fun you guys!
Sounds like a fun time. Another idea for those that are going to try… instead of using the sharpie and drawing on the paperbacking of proofgrade, I’m thinking you could in theory bring your own printout from home to the faire on plain printer paper and let the glowforge scan that vs hand drawn. just something to try if it works.
Just my thought, but if you plan on doing this, keep it simple. Very complex designs might slow the lines down too much and not be practical. That may be one of the reasons they do sharpie images for the attendees samples and save the detailed work for the hourly demo prints.
Good thoughts. perhaps if an attendee provided a drawing that the camera sensors could pick up and kept it within 2"x2" for example and steered away from greyscale photos or attempts to do anything hi-res to avoid lengthy engraving. (not saying the sharpie feature isn’t cool. it’s way cool. but also might be neat to see it showcase the same tracing feature from a different method. For example bring a 2 inch square paper printout with some plain text on it and see how the glowforge traces out the text)
However, please ignore this suggestion if it is deemed to hold up the line of waiting visitors etc…
It would be cool to see some really detailed cuts or engraves but I’d hate to have forum members get there and be disappointed if there has to be limitations due to time.
By the way, everyone who does attend and gets something lasered IS REQUIRED to post it. Hopefully a video of the action if allowed.
I suspect the sharpie and simple draw and etch + cut outline is to try and cope with massive demand like the reports from the NY Maker Faire last year. If everyone wants special treatment you might be the person in line responsible for having to tell someone they can’t have their special trinket engraved and cut.
IMPORTANT CHANGE: our presentation, “Laser Leatherwork, Woodworking, & Jewelry - LIVE!” will now take place at 10:30 am on Saturday, May 21st at the MAKE: Live! stage.
