Okay… So! Here’s an update… Kind of a flow here. Sorry if it seems a little raw.
@pdobrien, I took a closer look at the box before moving it from the car to the house. There were no shock sensors.
The tape on the bottom of the box was not looking good.
After we got the Glowforge out of the box, I flipped it to see how it looked from underneath:
So, yeah… It definitely could have fallen through with not much force.
Next!
There’s a paper that says
You’re about to make
something amazing.
to get started - and before you unpack these
boxes or do anything else - visit
app.glowforge.com
from your phone, tablet, or computer.
So I did. But WHY?! All it does when you go there is, something like, once you’ve unpacked the boxes and set everything up, come back here. So uh… yeah. A weird little waste of time I thought. But whatever… I moved on to unboxing.
One very small criticism is I think they should put a thin sheet of foam blanket over the Glowforge when shipping. The top, as you well know, is all beautiful glass. But it had a lot of little cardboard flecks on it. Nothing major or anything. Just some normal shipping “dust.” But it would have looked amazing if I would have removed a piece of foam to reveal the amazingly-beautiful Glowforge. Instead, I grabbed a cloth and wiped it down, and then beheld its beauty. And, let me tell you… it is beautiful.
So there are some shipping tabs to remove and the dox tells you exactly where they are and even has pictures. EXCEPT! It says there’s a “white foam block on the left side near the front.” Weird part about this one… There’s no picture of it. Weirder is, I don’t have one. I swear I don’t. There’s no much room to hide in there, and there’s no foam block. I looked, my son looked. I took my phone and took a picture of the side in case I just couldn’t see it from my angle… Nope! It’s not there. So, I moved on.
We plugged it in. We flipped the switch. IT CAME ON! The button was RED. Red always means bad. We heard a bubbling sound (dox say you’re supposed to). About 20 seconds later, the light turned from red to cyan. ALL GOOD! We followed the directions to connect it to our WiFi. Again, ALL GOOD! There was a step somewhere in the dox that said the head will move. It did do that, but not where the dox said. It was like 1 or 2 steps later. No big deal. I wasn’t worried. All looked good!
We beheld it for a minute and then I said “So… Should we print something?” My son said “YES.”
Please allow me to introduce…
Geordi
(A.K.A.: Commander Geordi LaGlowforge)
And, while I’m at it… Allow me to introduce Andy and his Glowforge Founder’s Ruler. (He has claimed it as his own and will be bringing it into school tomorrow.)
The instructions come with a “Your First Three Prints” doc.
- Print the ruler. (Above)
- Print a plaque that includes your very own hand-drawn artwork. (Below)
- Print something original from an application (Illustrator, etc.) (TBD)
I asked the kids if they wanted to draw something. Andy said yes. He says he sucks at drawing. I said I don’t care, it’ll be awesome because you’ll draw it, and then it will be real. So he made a couple of drawings before he settled on one. At this point we followed the instructions to add our image. Only we got:
Okay… Let’s chalk that up to… I dunno. Whatever. So we hit the Got It button, and then tried again. This time there was no error! Instead everything worked! We resized things, which had a pretty natural flow to it… didn’t need to play with the UX to figure it out or anything. And then we printed!
In case you can’t read that, it says Awesome Nice Daring Yay! and then “hello friend!”
So that’s where I am right now. We printed those 2 things. And I’m happy with them! Next up, my wife wants to print a photo onto our 
maple hardwood. I’m up for that. I really wish we had some darker wood to frame it in though. But, hey… it’s a start!
Thanks for reading! I hope this post helps at least one person out there!
EDIT: Oh! I forgot the other issue I ran into. Stuck in maple hardwood. It failed to recognize it. I quickly realized why though… The 
's own lights reflect off the sticker in such a way that it cannot read it. A little annoying.