That’s a choice you’ve made. I’ve been using CNC and lasers for years. Lasers tend to use mm. CNCs often use imperial (in the US). I use the measurement system that requires the least hoops for the machine. Redsail & K40s get mm. Shopbot & Glowforge get inches. Kind of like speaking French when in France. Do I wish they’d learn English (it is the world language after all)? Sure. Will they “fix” it? Not a chance, they’re French.
The whole “translate things into furlongs” argument is a result of how you chose to react - reductio ad absurdum. I can assure you that you don’t need to worry about any measurement other than inches & fractions (math is involved here). Yards, pecks, quarts, fortnights, furlongs, rods, miles, etc are not required. Very similar to imperial users using other lasers needing to work only in mm & cm - meters, kilometers, kilograms, liters, etc are unnecessary to get the job done. All I need to know is that 25.4mm = 1 inch and 3mm=1/8inch=.0125" Everything else is simple mental mathmatics.
Could they make it bi-lingual for measurements? Sure. Does it have to be to be emminently usable? No. Should I jump up & down and stomp my foot that they’re fools for ignoring the fact that I need to convert my designs from one system to the other? No. It’s not changing their priorities - nor would I want them to. Saving job settings (in whatever measurement system is used) is what I wish for more than being able to use metric.
And yes, we all know that it’s a simple thing and any programmer worth their salt would have done it already or designed it “correctly” in the first place. That’s the common refrain of people looking in from the sidelines and not doing what is being done here. I’m much more sympathetic to those arguments from people who are actually doing this rather than those who have a customer entitlement to grind. Please raise your hand if your bringing a new laser or CNC machine to market at equal quality but half the cost of the leading competition.
Just like every other product made by God or man, there are flaws. You choose how to react to those flaws. If they bother you enough, walk away. That’s what I do when confronted with people who insist on speaking Greek.
Back before I realized that I liked playing with Electric things better, we had an entire year of classes that required us to do everything in Metric, since it was happening Real Soon Now.
This was in 1966. Still Happening I reckon.
While dealing with construction and CAD, you get rather use to flipping between. Does not make it right, just that it can be dealt with.
Two words, or actually one compound word. Ominibar.
Just type “3.134mm in inches” into the Ominibar of any modern browser and out pops “0.1234 inches”.
Not saying auto conversion would not be nice but we don’t need to act like it not being there is the end of the world either.
I just thought it was Google’s omniscient presence (I don’t use Bing as my search engine and tend to just use Chrome as my browser - easier all around.)
Shopbot has an inbuilt metric converter so it can be run entirely in metric.
If, however,Glowforge was not specifically offered for International Purchase then i believe i could not expect an in-built converter. Clearly Glowforge was offered as an item for International Users: Check the Tech Specs all units are given in Imperial and converted to Metric.
…especially if they are bearing gifts?
I think that is where the problem lies.
We changed in '67 and never looked back.
You guys are used to doing the little conversions and stuff. Your country (or at least its leaders at the time) chose to stick with Imperial and it is the average joe who has to deal with that.
Most of the World chose to go Metric - it is not a question of what is better. As @rpegg correctly pointed out above… try buying shoes in different countries!
We do not know how to make those little calculations because we literally don’t have to. If you walk through Bunnings (our main source of hardware) you will be hard-pressed to see ANYTHING in inches… most people below the age of 30 could not tell you how many inches are in a foot; they cannot visualise how long an inch is. I have rarely met an American who cannot visualise a centimetre (even if you cannot spell it properly)
Glowforge might as well change measurements to ‘PewPewLengths’ for all the good inches does for us.
I am well aware that i could buy a $30 set of calipers that can convert to inches from some random online store. But we are fairly suspicious of online stores for electronics. Most of them are fronts to Chinese companies; returns are near impossible and them holding stock is not certain in any case. Postage is exorbitant.
Until you visit/live in Australia you cannot understand the importance of Bunnings (hardware) and JayCar (Electronics) to our shopping habits as well as lesser places like Repco, Supercheap Auto and the like.
I understand this is also a major difference between a country like ours and the US. We are much less likely to buy online mostly due to the warranty issues.
I use Ecosia, they plant trees with payments from searches
A consumer product in the US has to support inches or a majority of their customers would be screaming. Sad but true.
Of course once they start shipping outside the US they also need to support reasonable units. But this will be trivial, as if you look under the hood at all you’ll see that the software is already measuring everything in mm. It takes that the user enters as the material thickness or the focus depth and multiplies it by 25.4 to get mm.*
It should therefore be trivial to offer mm units for those two settings (which are the only places† in the UI where actual units are used now that speed/power are in wacky non-units) and I’d be surprised if they hadn’t yet mocked up a settings page with a “Use reasonable units” checkbox. I suppose it’s possible that they’re instead going to set it based on the customer’s country, but I’d be very annoyed if I weren’t allowed to set mine to millimeters.
* Yes, that’s an exact conversion, not an approximation. An inch has been defined in terms of mm for over 50 years now.
† Edit: Oops, I forgot about the LPI setting. Do people use lines per mm outside the US? Or lines per cm?
I want a globeclock that measures time in degrees, minutes, and seconds… but like bachelor’s degrees, and like when you want more mashed potatoes kind of seconds.
I’m up for metric as soon as possible. Once I started doing 3D modeling in OnShape, I pretty much stuck with metric. Then there are challenges with bringing those designs into Inkscape where my normal work flow had been Imperial. It all scales fine, but my default templates are still in Imperial. Sooner I can go to one standard of measurement, the better.
I’m used to doing woodworking in fractional inches, but there is the added complication of using 3 decimal points. The digital calipers does it for me. If you don’t have access to one, that would be a bite.
My original question - as yet unanswered, and really the only thing I was looking for - is “when can I expect to see metric supported in this product”.
things about the availability of calipers on amazon that read inches, or simple conversions of multiplying things by 25.4 to get my results each time, not what I was looking for.
I grew up using inches and I do understand them, it’s just not used in my work at all and it adds annoying steps that are frankly unnecessary. I know we’re working with the MVP release here and I expect it to improve - hence my original question - and my desire to have some idea of when that roadmap item might come along. Certainly shipping this product to the rest of the planet (which all uses metric) seems like a milestone that perhaps might require metric? One would hope. but that’s what I was asking, and why I asked it in the support forum.
Having previously relocated to France I am quite familiar with the requirement to speak French and perhaps that is an apt comparison here with the insistence on using inches
And really, having waited 2+ years and spent $4k+ to get this product, it’s not unreasonable of me to ask when it will support the world standard for measurement, is it? telling me I’m stomping my feet for asking a question is a little excessive. saying “if you don’t like it then design your own”… OK, mate. we can agree to disagree.
Glowforge never tells us when they’re actually going to release new features and only rarely lets us know that they’re even working on them. So ask all you want, just don’t expect any official answer.
(I don’t use Bing as my search engine and tend to just use Chrome as my browser - easier all around.)
