RE: We’ll release a GPL-licensed firmware for Glowforge

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I think this is the only thing they’re trying to address with the firmware release. There are many other reasons people want it, from security concerns to offline use to simple curiosity. But we know from other posts that GF does a ton of processing in the cloud and literally sends down raw motor waveforms. I see this as an emergency escape hatch: if somehow Glowforge Inc. goes bust or gets absorbed into Samsung and discontinued, there just might be a critical mass of people who care enough and have the skills to keep it from becoming a paperweight – my guess would be by porting an existing G-code platform to the Glowforge rather than replicating the cloud protocol.

You’re going to have to put in a lot of work to avoid having to tether your cell phone in the window, and the chances of not making a mistake along the way that fries a multi-thousand-dollar piece of hardware are quite slim.

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40

Converting 2D SVG patterns into motor waveforms isn’t a ton of processing. It is good deal simpler than a 3D printer tool chain.

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42

Of course, it’s trivial for you guys. My intention was not to impugn your ability to code a laser motion planner in your sleep. But I still don’t think the target market for the Glowforge is, was, or ever will be people who want to throw away the software it comes with and write their own, or even apt-get install something. The promise of GPL firmware is an insurance policy against Glowforge-the-company dropping or being unable to support Glowforge-the-product, and right now the last thing I and many others want to see is their limited resources being diverted from shipping product and working the bugs out of their code and into scrubbing profanity from commit messages so they can publish the source. I believe we will get it, late, like everything else. But we’ll get it.

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44

We’re working on creating a release of the source code for the Glowforge firmware now, which will be GPL-licensed. As with so many things, what seems like it might be trivial on the outside (just dump the repo!) is complicated on the inside (making sure there isn’t a password embedded in it, that we’ve filed for all IP, etc).

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45

Exactly what I wanted to hear as far as what, now the only variable is when.

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47

That’s too long for “hunter2”!

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49

There is another big box vendor that uses an open source community driven software then branched off to their own ‘flavor’ and does not contribute back to the source. The interesting thing is they encrypt the updates for their branch. But left the passphrase for the update files in clear text in the configuring file. Oops.

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50

The GFUI is basically unusable. I’m unable to make any kind of engravings. I’ve already made a forum post and contacted support and I was told my file was too large and that I should split it even though it was only 40kb and the splitting tool they linked to put a black border around the pieces making it impossible to tile. The web UI is slow, often crashes on chrome on linux. does not allow resizing by px or percent so you have to eyeball everything. it doesnt seem to have grid snap. getting the rotate handle to appear is random at best.

51

Is this only a problem for specific OS/browser combinations? I’ve heard about a few usability issues via the forums, but most people seem to be pretty happy with the web app from what I’ve seen.

I am genuinely curious about this, as I’ve waited this long based on high expectations regarding the quality of the Glowforge UX compared to what I would get with a far less expensive Chinese laser of similar power which might also have better hardware specifications.

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Vector files can be rotated, bitmaps (raster files) cannot at this point.

No engravings at all?

People have reported good things about SVGOMG have you tried that yet?

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I have and it made my image invisible in GFUI. I probably have too many option selected. I will have to experiment. I have been trying optipng and zopflipng on rasters.

Nope! I couldnt even engrave a box https://i.imgur.com/0GFIdVg.png

54

I just downloaded that box, opened it in Photoshop, and it is 58 inches by 38 inches in size. The image is too large for the laser. It can’t even load something that large onto the bed.

Your limits are about 18 inches by 11 inches for engraving, unless you reduce speed.

Edit: Much to my surprise, it does load that PNG in the GFUI. Let’s see if it can process it.

Answer: Nope. Crashes.

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55

Tying together two threads, both @Jules & @jbv are correct. The dimensions of your images are too great, not the file size, per se. I’d suggest testing a smaller image, perhaps in the range of 1000 - 1500 pixels square. YMMV, but I find smaller scale tests easier to diagnose. Best of luck!

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56

I use Chrome on Ubuntu and do not have any crashes on the computers that have plenty of ram and better processors. If I try it on one of my boxes that has 1/2 the amount of ram and older hardware, I can crash Chrome with the GFUI if the images are large, like over a half a meg.

Can you print the Glowforge provided default files in the catalog? Have you tried a small bitmap and engraved it?

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32 gigs of ram here and a Ryzen 1700x

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The engrave settings go up to 1355 LPI. wikipedia says that the source material should be 1.5 to 2 times the output. the horizontal resolution of the image is 4232. with an engrave setting of 1355 and 20 inches of width in the cutting space that means I should be using an image with a horizontal resolution of 54,200.

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59

And how’s that working out for you? No disrespect, but insisting on using maximum lpi for your tests seems a bit like test driving a car with the accelerator fully depressed, then complaining about the handling. : wink.

Best of luck to you – I’m bowing out.

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60

Yes but there is not much point setting the line width much smaller than the laser dot size as it will just overlap and engrave the same spot many times. The spot is around 0.008" so more than 125 LPI will start to overlap. Probably somewhere between 125 and 250 would give the best visual effect.

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61

There are two kinds of problems. One is the web UI front end, which tends to break in strange ways in Safari and, I guess, Edge. Since I switched to Chrome I haven’t had seen those problems (graphics disappearing, misalignment, inability to zoom).

The other kind of problem is the backend processing. This is when you upload a file and you get an error immediately, or it appears to work and you get an error after clicking print, or it does process the file but rendrers incorrectly. Some of the errors are random and transient, and you only need to reload and start over. Others are permanent, in the sense that a given file just won’t work and you need to go back to the drawing board, as it were (rasterizing, downsampling, not using certain SVG features, running it through an optimizer). I still haven’t internalized the tips and tricks to get a consistently successful result, so when I hit one of these it has usually ruined my evening because the round trip time back to Illustrator to make a tweak, export, upload, wait, adjust settings and position, click print, wait, get another error is quite slow. I expect I’ll run into a lot fewer of these going forward, and next time I’ll just try that optimizer instead if attempting to fix the art by hand.

As long as I’m here I guess there are two more categories: sometimes there’s an error with the machine, which may or may not manifest as an error with the machine. By that I mean you could get a yellow light and a message telling you to turn it off and on, or you could just get something that keeps failing with a generic error until you realize the power cycling the Glowforge fixes it. I’ve only seen this kind of thing a couple of times.

Finally, general usability of the web UI is pretty low. There are enough forum threads about that, but inability to do numerical positioning, save the state of a project, etc., also gets in the way for the workflows some of us would like. Others don’t care and either have workarounds or workflows that don’t depend on those features.

All the being said, the overall exprience is not that bad. In a way, it would be worse if it tried to do more, like if there were a bunch of drawing and editing tools that also didn’t work. As it is, you understand you need to do all your graphics manipulation externally, and the web app is just to preview and send the file. I have had jobs doing print production that were very similar, in that we’d have a machine with a fussy Postscript rasterizer bolted on to the side, and it was just part of the process to occasionally have to go back and fiddle with things to make it happy.

Long term though, I would really like to have something with about the same feature set as Silhouette Studio. I hope that’s on the roadmap after GA.

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