I have had my new toy for 3 days now. I have spent more time troubleshooting than printing. Trouble connecting to wifi: I need to do that multiple times each time I turn it on.
Trouble once connected: Stays in centering, homing, or focusing mode indefinitely.
Trouble printing: Once I have printed the machine doesn’t allow for me to print again. Button stays yellow and I have to start the printer up again and go through all the steps and troubleshooting I mentioned before.
I am so frustrated that I am having buyers remorse.
The yellow light is a general problem color and you are obviously having Wifi problems. The Glowforge is picky about a solid clear 2.4 Wifi availability. You can double-check by using a phone wifi and see if the problem persists. There are folks here who can better guide you on Wifi issues as I am not the one for that.
Official support can verify if your machine is having trouble maintaining a stable WiFi connection by looking at the machine logs. Email them, and expect a day or so to hear back.
Understandable, and unfortunate. Most, including me have not had any issue for close to 5 years now, your problem suggests connectivity is the most probable cause.
This^^. Also you can Google WiFi interference and explore those causes.
Most WiFi access points/routers nowadays are combined 5.8/2.4. But most consumer devices nowadays are 5.8 (the exception being IOT/home automation stuff which mostly still runs on 2.4). So many people don’t realize how crappy their 2.4 connections are until they fire up their GF and it has fits. And they don’t realize it’s a crappy 2.4 connection because everything else they’re using works fine (because those things are on 5.8 but the problem is with 2.4).
2.4 is a very noisy channel, particularly in urban/city environments. It’s used for a lot of stuff besides WiFi (like cordless phones, baby monitors, model airplane/car radio control, even Microwave Ovens run at 2.4GHz). It “penetrates” much better than 5.8 and being lower frequency it propagates further for the same transmit power. So in a more crowded environment 2.4 will often have more issues than 5.8.
So if you don’t know much about WiFi, the situation can leave you scratching your head. “My tablet and PC have no problems connecting to WiFi but my GF barely works” is because they’re not actually connecting to the same WiFi.
We installed an extender at the half way point between the router and the GF but we didn’t have any luck. The GF doesn’t even pick up the extender’s network. I ended up using my hotspot on my phone, worked great. This week we will be reconfiguring workspaces in this house so that we can all be close enough to the router.
