Not a fan having to upload projects to the cloud

[Jules]

@julien.dubuisson

What if Glowforge servers go down ?

@julien.dubuisson

But I doubt that the company would lose much when then will release their source code (I believe they said they would ).

The firmware was released early last year. (Github.)

@jeremy.a.harper

I use high end design software such as Rhinoceros 3D and Adobe products

So do I.

Helps to read these tutorials to understand what your options are regarding file types, and how to save them correctly for the GFUI. Once you have them set up to save correctly, and understand how to set up your designs, life gets a lot easier.

Laser Design Basics

Laser Design Basics.pdf (770.3 KB) dl488 9/6/17

Glowforge Interface - Vector Files Made Easy

It’s soooooo easy to create files easily in programs like Illustrator, Inkscape, CorelDraw and Affinity Designer if you understand what the Glowforge interface sees when it looks at your file. (Think of this as a last batch of Tips and Tricks, then I’ll quit bugging you.) I’m going to demo in Illustrator again, but the same things will be done in whatever program you choose to use for your designs. If you have questions about specifics for other kinds of drawing and modeling software, …

Glowforge Interface - Correctly Save a File as an SVG for the GFUI

For All Programs: If you want to engrave a bitmap (raster) style image and include it inside a vector SVG file, you need to Embed the image in the file if you want it to stay aligned inside the SVG file. Otherwise you will need to re-load the raster file and use the camera to align it visually. (That’s fine, but you will completely lose the benefit of more accurate alignment that you get from the design software.) There are instructions for how to Embed raster images for some of the main 2D…

For your specific complaint regarding topo maps being too data intense, you can make the Glowforge act just like a printer if you rasterize the data first. (Couple of clicks in Illustrator.)