Manual exhaust fan operation suggestion

Lots of ways to go here but here are a few off the top of my head:

Preferences setting that says “I want my exhaust to stay on for an extra minute after each job”

Add an checkbox in the tool to say “run the fan for minutes after the job is complete”

Give us a button in the gf app that says “turn the fan on” with maybe an auto shutoff

This seems like an easy win?

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Relatively easy win, one or more of those is in the hopper. We all like the idea of being able to vent longer. Essential workaround would be to run a low and slow, no power engrave to keep the fan going.

Definite ditto for this, especially for leather and rubber.

Following up with a comment on the structure of the forum. Discourse really does allow and foster ongoing conversation. We can really analyze things and explore at great detail At the moment it does not facilitate building a silo for the collective knowledge. Folks have suggested a wiki, which excels at this kind of thing.

Would be cool to have big tote board representing all the hopper suggestions and make it easier for getting a sense of what kind of energy is behind an idea.

I wonder what kind of information management system Glowforge is using to incorporate suggestions into making the priorities for their work flow and development schedule.

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For tracking suggestions, I’ve seen companies use Trello (for simple communities) and UserVoice or Aha (for complex communities making tons of suggestions). In either case, you can see what’s been suggested, dive in and discuss, vote (with paid Trello you get voting). There are many such systems…

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Have they ever implemented any request from the hopper period?

3D Engrave was a user request.

I’d say “get you your stupid glowforges” is being implemented fairly well now… The rest probably get sorted in priority of:

What will make/save us more money?

What will prevent us from killing anyone? (and thus getting sued)

What did we promise but haven’t yet delivered?

… a million other things …

and way down at the bottom, deal with people and their exhaust fan suggestions.

Anyway, it’s about how I’d prioritize these things if I were them :slight_smile:

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No it was marketed as having it already and more than is implemented now.

  1. 3D high-res engraving
    Engrave complex, three dimensional curves with 1,000 DPI resolution. To get perfect detail and sculpt with real depth, Glowforge can carve away material with multiple passes, each one focusing more deeply than the last.
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Now if they’d just make a “manual” 3d engrave setting.

Something like:

Deepest power: 220/100 Shallowest power: 600/100

Should work pretty well, I would think, using their 3d engraving algorithms.

(It should be noted that I actually have zero idea what I am talking about.)

i disagree. i would think things like the exhaust fan would be low-hanging fruit items. something that would bring a great deal of user satisfaction for the amount of investment needed to make it happen. that would seem to make it a fairly high on the list item (maybe just behind the “oh crap, we really need to finish this” items).

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Sure, the GF was marketed as doing things it can’t do yet - passthrough alignment, etc. . 3D Engrave wasn’t one of them, at least that I recall - they talked about cut, score and engrave, but not 3D. (Or did I miss it?)

Right now, as they should be, Glowforge is focused on “making it work” more than “add features”.

The section I quoted is from the front page and it looked like that when I ordered it on day 4. You can check with the wayback machine if you don’t believe me.

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After a flurry of requests to extend the fan time at the end of an operation they did. The fan on this PRU runs at least 5 seconds longer than it did.

I think the fans now run longer after longer, more intense cuts. (The kind that throw up a lot of smoke.) The times for post-op fan running seem to be different depending on what you are doing. (Might be mistaken, just an impression.)

While I agree with you, and think there would be a return on that sort of thing as well… this would assume that “make marginal user satisfaction improvements” is a high priority in their business plan. I am pretty willing to bet it isn’t.

I mean, there are a million tiny things they could do (see below), but justifying a full regression test for a few edge cases? No way. They’ll prioritize things that are broken or dangerous or already promised way ahead of the smaller stuff.

Just three things I think they could improve right offhand (out of many more):

Change layout of app (maybe move top menu to a new sidebar). The way it’s designed now, the GF workspace doesn’t even remotely match the aspect ratio of the page layout, which leads to wasted screen real estate.

Additional context clues on the colors. Orange/blue/etc isn’t enough, and on top of that there should be an easy guide to what the colors mean.

Light cyanish blue is a terrible choice for outlines when so many things we cut are light colored. The outline colors should be designed to contrast with the white of masking materials.

and so on and so forth. Better clearer iconography. Warnings when you are about to cut/engrave with a power of 1 on any path/region (likely you forgot to change it). The list is tremendous, I’m sure, and whatever we come up with I bet the GF people have a list 3x as long.

Anyway, none of this tweaking is nearly as important as things like “make the server-side software faster to reduce the processor time in whatever cloud farm we use” in terms of dollars, and so I think it’s going to wait.

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you’re confusing “things that you would like to have to make things better” with the concept of “easy to accomplish, low-hanging fruit.”

changing the app layout, changing iconography, improving server response time, these will likely take more effort than, say, extending the amount of time the fans run at the end of a job.

and, as @PrintToLaser said above, they’ve already extended the fan time once because of this exact kind of request. so i would be surprised if they couldn’t make another extension.

would they be able to, say, add a button that said, “run fans for 60 seconds.”? i don’t know, that may not be as “low hanging” as “make the fans run for 30 seconds longer after every job.” but probably a whole lot easier than changing the layout of the app.

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Also the ability to drop an SVG onto an existing project while in the GFUI.

And the constrained rotation (shift+click) when rotating objects in the GFUI.

Link to help/fixes list on the GFUI (such as the “latest improvements” page is).

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Thanks for the suggestions! I’ll make sure the team gets them.