First off, I received an email this morning at 11 am. UPS tracking was included so took a look. It said out for delivery… What!! So this surprised me and had no warning to get things ready and to be home to sign.
So got it setup and went about trying to print the GF ruler. First off it takes forever to calibrate and is around five minutes each time I wanted to print something.
The bed image came up and was not clear then it decided to just go away.
Then the head stayed in one position so I tried to cancel the cut. That button did not respond so I had to power off.
Then the app lost its connection. When it reloaded I could not back out of the current project.
So I powered off everything and got out of the app. Restarted the GF and the head slammed to the left side. Said it was calibrating and took over ten minutes with nothing seeming to happen.
Anyhow several go arounds later I finally cut the ruler out. AT least it looked okay.
In all, I am not impressed at all. I wish now that I had gone with the Muse instead of this thing.
The biggest issue is if it must calibrate every time I need to cut something then this is going in the garbage. I have a lot of experience on my friends lakers over the last several years and they work faster and with less hassle.
That’s not normal. I’ve seen that happen on and off the past few days, but it’s clearly a bug. Normally it only calibrates once when you first turn it on.
I’ve used mine for a month and only started having the repeated calibration start around Friday or Saturday. They seem to push out updates around once a week and I’m sure we’ll see this bug fixed within a few days.
As long as the connection is solid, the calibration should be only once after you turn on the machine. Takes 90 seconds. So normally 90 seconds out of each day. It’s possible that your machine was shipped prior to one or more updates. Might take a little bit to settle out. Kind of like every time I upgrade to a new Windows computer. Takes a bit to download and install all the patches. The left side crash is only during calibration and a pain until they figure out a solution. The unit is likely not recognizing the position of the head after startup so it goes the wrong way. Folks are positioning the head within the camera field of view before power-up until that issue gets fixed.
First off, your concerns are valid. As a mostly satisfied customer, I’m only posting this reply in case it helps you out while you’re waiting for an official answer from support.
My suspicion is that the bulk of the things you experienced are due to an intermittent WiFi connection. If it’s worth the effort, you might want to try moving things around to get a stronger signal. That being said, a few specific points:
We’ve had a lot of back-and-forth about this lately. The short version is that sometimes it does this but Glowforge hasn’t yet acknowledged whether they consider it a flaw and/or intend to fix it. While many of us are of the opinion that it’s unacceptable, if you want to guarantee it never happens, you can always move the head to the center by hand (while the power is off) before you turn it on. It will also speed up the calibration a little bit.
You do have to wait for calibration every time you power it on. It is a bit of a delay, but it’s typically not as bad as what you experienced. You should be able to leave it on and run several prints without needing to power cycle or calibrate in between, although there have been times when the servers get a bit wonky and stuff starts failing and the only way to move forward is to keep resetting the thing. It’s early days, I think they can do better with server reliability. And again, it’s kind of a rare situation, most of the time it does work just fine. And I don’t think you were encountering server issues, it really does sound like the local connection between the Glowforge and your WiFi access point was having problems.
I wish you luck getting these issues resolved and becoming a happy camper. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I think it’s worth giving it a few more chances.
Feels like the unit is really sensitive to weak signals/packer loss/however you want to define signal quality.
Since the unit/app doesn’t have a signal strength indicator, maybe try logging into your router and seeing what kind of signal strength the unit is showing (or, signal strength of the unit and extender if it’s connected that way).
@chris1’s answer is likely the correct one. Sounds like shoddy signal reaching the unit. Certainly possible the wireless NIC in the unit is faulty, but just as likely it’s just the signal reaching the unit. I’d recommend using a mobile device and installing WiFi Analyzer on it, sit it on the tray and close the lid. See what signal strength you’re getting in there.
It definitely has to calibrate every time you turn it on. But that process typically takes about 1 minute (give or take).
Also, when you say you pressed the button to cancel, not sure if you meant the software cancel button, or the hardware button. Just so you know, that hardware button is a Start only button.
You sound like you’ve already made up your mind to sell it, so do please PM me if that’s the case. I have somebody who’d probably buy it from you. Then you can get that Muse you’re after.
I’ve had my pro since August and normally it works pretty beautifully. Tonight it’s been about 30 minutes of turning it on and off again uploading and whatnot just to try and print a couple of rectangles with tabs. In my experience this is not normal.
If it is stuck calibrating, restart the machine (because ‘Cancel’ is grayed out). If it is stuck scanning, cancel the op in the UI and rescan. 5 times today this has happened, and every time the second scan went through seamless. Just what I have seen today.
Quick follow up from me on that as well. I decided to wait it out both times it happened to me tonight (“stuck” scanning) and it actually did proceed on its own within a few minutes. I want to be fair that it wasn’t really stuck, just unusually slow.
Regards WiFi signal. All my other mobile devices are showing full bars sitting next to the GF. Just in case I did place an extender five feet away from the unit with no change. My main router is only thirty feet away also.
The cancel job issue was in the application page not hitting the button. It would not respond at all causing me to have to do a power down whilst cutting.
I also had a major issue of not being able to back out of a job prior to hitting the cut (start) button on the GF. I could not get back to selecting another job.
I know this thing is pretty new but the application is very weak with a lot of issues.
Reading around the forums it seems that a lot of folks are having similar issues. My feeling is that the Cloud part is maybe getting slowed down now that a few of these units are being used. During all the demos over the last couple of years. One would not see any slowness giving the impression that this thing was very responsive which it seems not to be.
I guess that I’ll give it a month or so for the folks to fix more bugs. However, I would have thought that the app would have been more robust by this time in the game. Another thought is why does it require calibration overtime it is powered on? With other lasers you mechanically adjust and your good to go for a while before re calibrating. Does the GF not save the calibration to be similar?
Several of us were having calibration and other issues tonight (for the last few days, honestly). @dan replied to those posts saying that the problem should be fixed now. For what it’s worth, this is the only time I’ve ever had a problem using the GF, and I’ve had my since July.
I have seen the laser head on my GF tap the left side during the startup. It taps three times and this happens about 25% of the time I start it up. It is just a tap, tap, tap, no signs of anything that I would be concerned about. My 3D printers have made much more scary noises with no ill effects. I have had to manually position the head under the camera once so far.
One thing to keep in mind is that GF elected to go with machine vision instead of mechanical position sensing. I think there is a reason for it, but while they are working out the bugs there will be some odd behavior. I have found that placing material in the 'Forge before turning it on helps.
I agree with the WiFi points - it is not just the distance between your GF and the router - it also has to do with what interference is in the area. I suspect that the WiFi unit in the GF does some intelligent frequency hopping, but it may need to be rebooted from time to time if there is a lot of interference. I see a noticeable fluctuation in interference in my house depending on the time of day, so this may be contributing.
Because rather than using limit switches to physically sense when the head has hit the edge (as other lasers do) the Glowforge uses the bed camera to find where the head is. Since you might have moved the head while it was turned off, it needs to find the head with the camera every time you turn it on.
Under normal circumstances calibration takes under two minutes and only has to be done once, immediately after turning on.
But a software update late last week seems to have introduced a few bugs: calibration is sometimes taking longer than normal and for some reason it’s sometimes recalibrating between prints. (In addition there is a new bug where it seems to hang on the scanning material step.) Hopefully all these bugs will be fixed in the next few days. I had never seen any of these problems before last Friday.