It is offline and will not connect. I have tried turning it off and unplugging it for ten minutes, then turning it back on. I’ve tried holding the power button until it turns teal and restarting the setup/detect_device process. I’ve logged out and logged back in. It’s still not connecting and not doing any calibration. Just lights and fans.
You made so many good decisions with this device, I can’t believe you made such and incredibly stupid decision to make it reliant on wifi connections.
What else can I do to get this thing back on-line and working again?
Well, I interrupted everyone else and rebooted everything - wifi, glowforge, laptop. After a while it finally let me re-do the setup. Thanks for the suggestion Rpegg. I’m not happy I had to do it, but at least it worked.
Very disappointed in this problem. So much to like about the machine but this is a serious Achilles heel. If you guys ever want to sell me another one, it’s going to need a port to plug a cable into.
Well, I know you marked it “Resolved” but it really isn’t. The Glowforge is back working, but it’s not acceptable to need to reboot my household on a regular basis. You’re going to need a better solution to this in the not too distant future.
An HP printer and another device hang my wifi about once every 45 days. Everything else works but no amount of standing on one leg and baying at the moon will correct the situation. Only solution is to power cycle my router.
Coincidentally, I was recently informed by my cable service provider that if i want to keep my router functioning correctly, I should reboot it once a week by unplugging it for half a minute or so. I don’t know if that’s something that’s necessary for all routers, but according to them, it is for this one.
Just something to think about. It might make all of your devices function much more smoothly.
That’s just a stop-gap measure. You shouldn’t have to restart it, they’re telling you to do that to prevent a call to them about your Internet not working by ensuring your router isn’t hung. It’s a simple enough thing to log into the router admin panel and check, as well as performing a few perfunctory test to confirm. Thing is most people can’t be bothered so they tell you to restart it weekly.
Honestly? I can’t be bothered either.
Unplugging it for a half a minute is quicker than making a phone call and sitting through another customer-deterrent system.
Just a part of household maintenance that you have to do like the laundry and emptying the dishwasher.
If the problem is with a wonky router though, there’s not a damned thing in the world that Glowforge can do about it. That’s an issue for the service provider.
For what it’s worth, after having issues with all-in-one modem-routers, I’ve switched to I “upgrading” my home network whenever I move (often because of work) by installing an aftermarket wifi router (TP-Link). I have had better luck with throughput and reliability by having a dedicated device handle the traffic routing and letting the modem (whether DSL or Cable) just handle xmit & rx.
I disagree Jules. Glowforge can provide a usb port, and then all wifi problems solved! That’s my real complaint, that anyone would think relying on wifi connections is acceptable as the one and only way to make something like this work.
Most router problems are caused by overloading the wifi with too many devices, a situation difficult to avoid when everybody wants their devices using it.
Offering wifi as an option is great. Requiring it is maddening.
There have been quite a few times lately that I’ve thought about switching, but not because of the Glowforge. We’ve been slowly developing a dead spot in the “secondary office”. (Lots of complaints from DH.)
I’m running an outdated TP-Link C2 router, though at work we just upgraded to a TP-Link AC1900 and it’s been 100% reliable for the last 3 months. And it gets lots of hard use, it’s in a sealed enclosure, 12"x10"x14", with a USB powered fan mounted on the back, and streams 3x HD video streams 10hrs a day.
Well, it would be nice if future models offered a direct connection capability, but the reason they didn’t do that in the beginning has to do with their ability to make updates to the software behind the scenes through a WiFi connection, and reverse them quickly if there’s a problem.
That keeps them from having to make people download and install updates, (which is a process that can have everyone’s machine down for up to a month at a time if they push a buggy release and it has to be reloaded manually…I’ve seen it and it is ugly.)
There are some small inconveniences with doing it this way, granted. But there would be a lot more doing it the other way. At worst, I’ve been inconvenienced a couple of times, and usually I was able to reboot everything in a few minutes and get it running again. That really beats being down for weeks at a time. You better believe people scream then!
I would like to see a USB port eventually, but I have mixed feelings on the current wifi setup.
It actually is very helpful for me. bOb lives in my side shop and is a good 30 or 40 foot away from my main computer. If I had to cable it, I would be working from my laptop (and I hate laptops).
Not trying to be insensitive to your problem, just pointing out that being on a wifi setup can also have good points with different setups.
I’m not a fan of the cloud-hosted interface to begin with, so if it’s also a justification for forcing an unreliable connection onto me, I’m really opposed to it.
There’s no good reason for $5k (or $8k ) worth of sophisticated electronics sitting three feet apart to have the weak link of the Internet between them. For a situation like brokendrum, where a wired connection is impractical, a wifi link between computer and printer is good (but even then, the USB slot could also let you plug a thumb drive in with your file and print from that - my home laser printer, which is nominally wifi capable and often even works over wifi, allows this and it has saved a lot of frustration).
It is just a fragilista decision to have only wifi. When I backed the kickstarter, I never, ever, thought there wouldn’t be a wired option. If I’d known that, I never would have put my money down.
