What will be interesting to watch is how the Pebble hardware can lessen it’s dependency on the cloud in the next few months. Once official support goes away, the watch will for the most part be “bricked”. Not sure if they are open sourcing their firmware, but even so, the functionality will be greatly reduced once the cloud it’s dependent on is shut down.
Another similarity between Pebble & Glowforge is that at the end of the day, both are “internet of things” devices very much dependent on the cloud.
Hopefully the glowforge ecosystem flourishes & we never have to face this situation. But even while Glowforge’s firmware will be open sourced, a lot of why we fell in love with Glowforge in the first place is the secret sauce in the cloud.
Even with the extremely capable hands of community-based developers, the open source firmware for the Glowforge will only take us so far. At that point, we can hope that someone can simply enable Glowforge to accept gcode commands.
Or if we’re really, really lucky, someone might be able to modify the glowforge firmware to interface with competitor or open source applications like LasaurApp: https://github.com/stefanix/LasaurApp
If their single serve pouches were on the range of a dollar, maybe…but 400 plus for the squeezer and then 5 to 8 bucks per serving…and if it’s a day over the 8 day shelf live it won’t squeeze it for you?
I detest FITBIT. my ONE croaked at 15 months. never been abused dropped or even looked at with a stern look.
They told me they would give me 25% off a new one. I told them I wasn’t interest in a hardware subscription. I hope they crash and burn. The deserve it. one nitwit on the forum said and I quote directly “It lasted the warranty period what is your problem?”
clearly he had been dropped numerous times on his head as a baby/child.
Apparently the new thing is to put fingerprint scanners into cards, powered by vampiring juice out of the chip reader connection. All this to save the person from keying in a PIN code.
i mean, i can understand being upset. what do expect a company to do, though, when a product fails outside of its warranty period? i think it’s pretty clear that most of their products do last longer than that, but every company has it’s lemons.
or to prevent people from seeing your pin being used, or guessing an easy one. not to mention that some people manage to take forever to enter in that number.
sorry, some fingerprint scanners are easy to defeat. we won’t know how well theirs works until it’s out.
Really? Seems pretty good on my laptop! I always have to swipe more than once…And then when it times out, I remember to lick the potatoe chip grease off my fingers!
This is why I like my Apple watch, more accurate hardware and software than fitbit and it has apple pay built into it. Both problems solved. I’ve had it, used every last functionality, and abused the crap out of it. still working like a champ.
Here’s a good analysis on why the Juicero costs so much… custom ABS injection-molded case, custom power supply… sound familiar?
(Not in any way implying some sort of equivalence between GF and Juicero… GF clearly understands the needs and wants of their customers; Juicero is a classic case of letting the engineers be the product managers.)
I hadn’t come across this product before (I lead a very sheltered life !) but found the write up of the breakdown of the design quite enlightening .
Thanks for posting this.
John
Then I just would laugh at the investors and “customers”. After that I would try to come up with something to dupe them out of more money. because apparently it is pretty easy with that group.
