Special Note: This is a new service that the Regular crew is trying to offer, where we will attempt to gather the best notes from the forums in one place. This is intended to help those who visit the forums rarely to have a single stop location to catch up on important news.
These are the posts made by Glowforge staff which we consider worth highlighting for those who do not read the forums often:
(This one is older, but a ton of information, and this is the first weekly highlight reel, so a few archival items are appopriate):
As you may know from our previous update , weāre shipping pre-release units to customers now. These are units that have only small differences from what we expect of production units, delivered before the software has all final features.
When we ship a unit, we want you to confirm that you want it. That means every unit - production or pre-release - starts with an email explaining exactly you can expect. For users who havenāt read every forum post to keep up on developments, this will help themā¦
Pro and Basic slated to manufacture at the same time:
I think we covered this, but in case Iām misremembering - all the long lead time parts are ordered; we expect full production at the same time as the Basic.
Confidence of Investors:
Just a few things the investors know that you might not.
What successful hardware startups are normally like. Theyāve seen them all, and our teamā¦ well, I canāt brag about them enough.
What a Glowforge is like to use. Theyāve been able to use them, and see others use them.
The actual details of all our finances, manufacturing schedule, quality numbers, etc. And back to the first point, they know how these details compare to most companies.
(I know a lot of people here would like to know #ā¦
Manual for the Laser will be made available on the forums when finalized:
@scottmillersb , I hear and understand your opinion and requests. I believe Iāve read all of your posts (and in fact, just about every post in the forum right now - I have just 500 or so left to go). I believe youāre waiting to hear that Iām going to do some or all of the things you are requesting, or that Iām going to refuse to do them.
Iām not going to make any decisions right now. Iām going to continue to talk to my team, listen to you, our customers, think about how we can improve, and decā¦
Honeycomb cleanup sounds easy:
We havenāt designed or tested for that, so Iām afraid I donāt know. [quote=āPFI-Guy, post:165, topic:3587, full:trueā]
Do you have any tips or experience on cleaning the honeycomb to knock down the build up?
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I donāt think Iāve ever mentioned this, but - the honeycomb has an open area on the bottom for detritus to fall, and a slot at the front so you can just tip and shake the whole thing in the garbage.
Laser Tube is 50mm diameter (longer lifespan):
Itās a 50mm diameter tube (not one of the slim ones).
Swappable head was a day 1 feature:
If itās any consolation, it has - my cofounder built a combination laser, CNC, plasma torch, 3D printer in his garage with an interchangeable head before we started the company. It was in there from the start.
I apologize for the delay. I canāt wait to get you your Glowforge.
Power Supply is finalized (was previous cause of delay):
The former; weāll use these for testing.
Yes! The power supply is golden.
There are many small changes we need to make as we fix and improve things, but no major broken areas that need fixing to ship like the power supply.
Right.
Refund procedures from Rita
When someone cancels at Glowforge - the 3D laser printer , they see a confirmation screen that lets them know what to expect next. Support receives an alert that we need to process the refund, which we typically do within a business day or two. We send an email when the refund is processed. After that, itās common for the actual transfer of funds to take several business days.
Reliability of lid camera for positioning
The lid snaps into place and is registered on all sides so it sits repeatably.
Glowforge runs lowers speed than the motors are capable of:
Itās true. But it will get faster. The maximum speed right now is set very conservatively, and the motors are capable of running more quickly. But doing this without negatively impacting quality has significant ramifications throughout the motion control system, so it will be a while in coming.
Blast gate or other door type of cover advised for exhaust tubing:
I donāt have definitive environmental #s yet, but as a general rule youāll want to keep extreme temperatures & actual moisture out of it. A blast gate or flap or similar is a good idea.
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These are the posts made by users (not official staff) which are worth highlighting:
I know this is a tumultuous time, but Ive been waiting to see this since the glowforge was announced. Im sure anyone who read the email has seen it, but its easy to get lost in all the chaos of the delay, and Iām too excited not to post about it. In light of that I wanted to make a thread to talk about HOW AMAZING this 3d engrave looks!
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I dont doubt that you have seen me be on dan and crewās butt about the 3d engrave function. Well, they knocked it out of the park! I cant believe how ā¦
With all the negativity right now, I want to focus on some of the positive. Namely, the Expansion port. I definitely squeed
Here is something I made a longtime ago on my CNC using a depth map and CAM software(I think it was mastercam ART) dark areas are the thickest. I think the 3D engrave would do this with ease!
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Got the idea from old porcelain lamp shades.
Here it is not back lit, kind of creepy
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It was machined from 1/4 white acrylic, step over was maybe .005.
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These are the posts about things made by Beta and Pre-Production users which are worth highlighting:
In an attempt to try and learn more about how to create my own designs using gradient 3D depth grayscale engraving, I used google image search and I found some images online to try out.
Keep in mind that these are fairly low resolution āwebā images to start with. I did increase the resolution to 300dpi (keeping the āprintā dimensions the same) and they are small. Iām sure that much higher quality source images would produce much higher quality results with much finer detail. Pretty sure these mā¦
I decided to try and work with engraving photos, and test out some of the manual settings to see some differences and learn about the possibilities as well as to see results in different wood types. Beta Project: Halftone Pattern Engraving ), but these were still rasterized engravings from vector .svg sources. This would be straight raster (pixel based) .png images, converted to grayscale, ā¦
Iām not putting this in a topic about the bed, the X,Y or the homing zero positions topics.
Iām putting this here as a start to the investigation of how the Glowforge operates and not how we wish it to operate. Iām pretty sure those two ends will coincide.
Screen captures and other images to follow.
Please disregard portrait video. I need to remember that when leaning over things and shooting video, I have to check orientation.
Lesson learned.
Ok, another lesson learned is to figure out theā¦
My daughter and her obsession with Kuchi Kopi has returned for another project. I had her run through the whole process of printing this time. She did her usual hunt around the web for a picture she liked, then traced it in Illustrator. She saved it as an SVG, then uploaded it to the designs, choose which objects should be cut/raster/score and finally print. Here she is eagerly waiting to see how it turns out.
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We chose to score most of the lines in the design which made it a prettyā¦
So, a while back Iād asked if there was any Delrin or acetal plastic available to play with. I finally got a chance to play with some. From experience on other lasers I know that I usually have to cut it a bit slower than I do acrylic so I took a calculated guess to start at and it actually worked the first try. I was using some 1/8 inch white acetal that Iāve used on other machines. It cuts like melting candle wax really and though you donāt get really crisp edges like you do with acrylic, ā¦
Hello again!
Ok, Iāve gone back to making some more simple shapes. Joints are easy peasey when they are 90ās, so I wanted to work out some tougher joints. First I set out to build a octagonal column. Hereās the CAD.
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Then I moved on to adding a hip roof to a square tower. Hereās the CAD for that.
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I was pleasantly surprised when everything snapped together nicely on the first try.
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And thatās that. I need to make an octagonal roof now.
After some success working with leather on the earring project and further experiments (Beta Project: Leather Earring Experiments ), I decided to continue to see what else I could come up with. So, I designed and created some simple bracelets.
Was testing out some 1/8" plywood and decided we needed another ornament so I found a nice Star Wars design to play with.
[image]
A little paint and of course glitter makes everything better [image]
Inspired by Kallistiās work on the cool fidget toys I ordered some bearings with the intention of making some stocking stuffers. I started with a simple design Iād seen before, just a triangular design with bearings at each point and in the center. A friend at work actually beat me to it and made one the day before I got my bearings in the mail so I was able to use his design to work out the details like what size holes I needed to counter the kerf of the laser. I cut a couple of sample holesā¦
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[image] [image] [image] The epoxy looks great, but sadly I now need to find something that slides on it nicely since the puck doesnāt move well currently. Maybe I can find some bearings or something to mount to the bottom of the puck
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This is a great idea.
Thanks for taking the time to do it.
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This is really awesome!! Inspite of being on the forum almost daily, I somehow manage to miss āthe good stuffā. Thank you so much for this succinct recap!!!
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Iāve noticed the same. maybe weāve missed some discourse settings to keep threads unread for longer.
Any of you discourse pros got some hints for us?
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Wow thatās realy helpful! I try to keep up to date but I find this forum a little bit tricky and sometimes hard to follow so thank you very much for doing this!
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Weekly Highlights for the next week are posted now: Weekly Highlights for the week of 11-DEC-16
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