Hello Everyone. I would greatly appreciate any advice on the following issue:
I run a school innovation center which includes one Glowforge Plus unit. The laser cutter is by far the most popular machine in the lab, and routinely I have a steady stream of jobs to be cut. I am considering purchasing a second machine (Basic), but I am, admittedly, wary about investing into a second machine. I fear if the company goes out of business, I will be stuck with two obsolete machines. (I considered a Dremel, but that company stopped the laser-cutter product line.) Cost is another issue, as I donât have a huge budget. So is it worth it to buy a second unit, or is there too much ambiguity about the long-term support for these products? Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Hi Greg, while I shared your fear, We are uncertain of anything, and why sit in a dark corner waiting for the worst to happen (it usually doesnât) Iâm going to be radical and suggest getting a Glowforge PRO as the second machine, its more versatile, and being a âschoolâ maybe you can get a discount, I am SURE that @MyDogsThinkImCrazy will provide you with a code that can save you $500+ her $500 on a new purchase.
Good luck whatever you do!
All I had growing up was a band saw and a shop teacher with half of his thumb missing.
As I said see if you can get an âeducator discountâ as a company, you sell one machine cheaper and you get 30 more costumers⌠. . . never hurts to ask.
Hello! I work a lot with STEM programs. I personally have two glowforges and I live in a really rural area so our local school did not have much for a STEM program. With the pandemic I was teleworking most the time and so I would let the local schools send me designs and I print them on my machines. So they basically virtually had two machines. We eventually were able to get a good deal on a used one that will be useful for them in person to use.
I am not sure about your fears of them going out of business? I mean, if Snapmaker is still in business then I donât see how glowforge would go out (kidding)
I personally love having two glowforges because I can now let projects build up and knock them out really fast. The app is amazing at juggling two machines as well. The machines I have is a pro and a plus. The value of the pro is the passthrough but I am not sure on the age of the students you work with and if even using the passthrough is practical. When class 4, that is a pretty big safety waver and will the students actually go through the SOP reading?
I have a few referrals left and would be happy to share my code. The referral codes give you a discount and then gives me a equal credit but I personally like to keep my motive separate on why I recommend glowforge. So I just let whoever uses my code also have the credit glowforge gives me (I cant directly move over the credit but I just let them pick out materials of the credit amount and have it sent to them or sometimes buy out the credit). I like supporting school labs and so I would be happy to send you my link. I think the plus is a better value because of the longer warranty.
Hi Greg,
Regarding the companyâs stability, my perception is they are in a strong position.
When they launched this effort in 2015, they were hoping to reach orders worth hundreds of thousands if I remember correctly, and ended up with orders over 20 million in presales. Clearly there is a large market for a desktop product.
Then there were companies emulating them, and I personally think glowforge was better than any of them. I think a buy out would be much more likely than them folding.
Just my perception, and worth every penny you paid for it.
I definitely donât think you need a Pro for a second machine. I donât think you gain enough to make the investment worthwhile. A Basic is fine for just churning out more things. And if you do have the budget for the Pro, Iâd probably recommend a different laser if youâre doing the cutting yourself. There are other inexpensive lasers out there that arenât as user-friendly, but might give you more bang for your buck as a second option.
That said, GF has the ability to open our machines up for use without connecting to their servers. While Iâm not expecting them to go belly-up any time soon, hopefully they would make good on their promise to unlock the machines if it happens.
They did release some of the firmware but pretty deep analysis of that showed it to be fairly useless in replacing the server side component of the processing. Likewise, without a USB or ethernet port, thereâs no easy way to talk to the machine without their servers.
I donât recall any commitment from GF that they would provide the motion planning and control software that currently executes on their servers to anyone in the event theyâre sold or close down.
I think thereâd be a huge number of folks who would be much happier if that were true though so if you can post the appropriate link we can make it part of some of the various stock answer threads for the next set of questions relative to cloud dependency.
There is no way for the machine to be decoupled from their servers without our machines taking over 100% of the processing. Far, far more than your standard laser controllers and 100% proprietary. The GF does not have the necessary H/W to be driven by something similar to GCode.
Technically thatâs not correct. The machine is just a linux computer with some motion control hardware. The âprint jobsâ may not be gcode, but they are very close to it - and completely downloaded to the machine before printing begins, so it has the memory and processing capability to handle it.
The machine wouldnât need to create the motion control instructions (gcode), your computer would. Thatâs exactly how other similar machines (3d printers, CNC routers) are run.
HOWEVER âdecouplingâ would require a major change, because the OS on the machine only talks to a hard-wired internet address - the GF cloud. Only the very early machines even had a USB port, itâs unpopulated on mine. There is physically no way to change out the firmware (which is just an operating system and bundled applications) without re-wiring the hardware.
Essentially, for 99.9% of all owners, without the GF cloud, the machine is inoperable.
I donât understand why we cant âspoofâ the address of the Servers, with no internet, the machine would still be looking for the âaddressâ âapp.glowforge.comâ â if we had a local server running the code using that address⌠the GF SHOULD think its talking to the âmothershipâ
Thatâs because you donât understand how âcertificate authenticationâ works. A basic method of securing online communication since the internet was invented.
In my hypothetical world, the LAN server has a SSL emulation, that allows for communication between the Internet appliance (glowforge) and the Local server - Iâm not saying will it be done, I am just speculating CAN IT BE DONE.
(kidding)