perfect lol
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Itās one of those āIām not except when I amā sort of things. Last week Wednesday we found a major error in assembly, so I was on a plane Thursday morning to the factory walking the line with engineers from both teams to make sure it didnāt happen again. Realistically itās a bit of a show - everything I knew came from our engineers the night before, and they were there and could have said it themselves. But we all wanted to make sure nobody who orders a glowforge would have this problem, so I get to spend a day at the factory to make the point for everyone.
I am happy to report that it has been 5 weeks since I last manually aligned a Glowforge and 4 weeks since I last actually attempted to decipher something interesting from a digital circuit analyzer. The latter was doing a wee bit of science with @eva and @jared, the former because it was just me, @bailey, and a Glowforge with a production defect. It was just like old times, except my only tools were a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, so there was some improvising to be done.
OK, Iāll be honest. I miss it.
I spend most of my time meeting with the members of the team here, interviewing prospective new employees, and @rpeggās aforementioned paperwork. Plus lots of legal junk. I hate phone calls.
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There is usually some aspect of a big project that is unappealing. I do well as an artist, but suck at marketing.
Not surprised that you would rather be tweaking a Glowforge than talking with lawyersā¦ 
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Doing my very best to be patient. That said, announcing a v2.0 after recently announcing a huge funding round and reading quotes like āGlowforge said today that it will launch its own line of āProofgradeā materials and a new catalog of printable designs.ā doesnāt build confidence that you are focused on shipping to people who will have waited more than a year to get their machine, before you try to sell them patterns and materials.
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Iām hoping I get to use my Glowforge before I get any sales pitches for consumables. Seems like people willing to take a pretty sizable financial risk on funding this project (and your company) are savvy enough to find materials to use.
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Is the platform essential to run the machine? If not, are we all waiting on software to get our machines?
- Seems like Dan is excited about future things, that is the CEOās job. I think if we hear from Operations as well on any developments that impact the December delivery date, it would be beneficial.
I do appreciate all the development and efforts going into shipping a quality product. I hope I get to use it one day. 
They have not announced a v2.0 - that was idle speculation and chatter on the forum.
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@valerie_lord, I appreciate your post. It raises some very good points about the progress of the business side of Glowforge. The Proofgrade issue is definitely a secondary issue for most of the folks that post regularly on the forum. That said, it definitely was part of the initial business plan and mentioned prominently in the promotional media. Especially in making the Glowforge useable right out of the box for those unskilled in making things using design software. I spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out how to design something taking into account material and kerf size. Just canāt do it until I get some real world experience.
Looking at all the recent hires does indicate building out the materials catalog and the online part of that, and then the promise of some free Proofgrade materials with the delivery definitely bulks out the catalog. All in all, though, I look at the skill set and see that making excellent software to run perfected hardware seems to me the central effort of the company.
My gut feeling is edging toward a expecting a Glowforge before December. I am interested in making some bets on that, for fun and games. A recent comment by @dan reminded me that he has wanted to get lasers to the masses since he was young. I have no doubt that this goal is what is driving him and the company first and foremost,.
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Thanks for the clarification jamesdhatch. That doesnāt change my frustration with the other announcements about platform and consumables.
I understand that in crowd funding there is a risk. Iām unfairly thinking about GF in context of other hardware projects Iāve been reading about this week (F-stop camera bags & Skully AR-1 motorcycle helmets) that went nowhere and people were left hanging. I know GF is making every effort to get things shipped. Iām just frustrated today because. I want to be using the machine, not reading forum speculation on v 2.0. I too want to make cool stuff and contribute to the community.
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Mine as well. Iām leaning towards first deliveries happening about 6 weeks out - say end of Sept. My outside guess is end of October. The latter is pushing the envelope in order to get them all out before year end - gonna assume he & the staff are going to take some time off for holiday R&R at Thanksgiving & Christmas. 
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What many people donāt realize(and given the todayās huge following of crowd-funding itās understandable) that this wasnāt a crowd-funded project. This was a good old fashioned pre-order.
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@valerie_lord, Iām sorry for the confusion! Iāve tweaked the name of this thread to make it extra clear, but: weāre not working on anything except delivering your Glowforge and everything you need to make it work well. The context of that quote was someone asking if Iām thinking about Glowforge 2.0, and my answer was that no, weāre excited about building 1.0, and the materials and catalog that make it possible.
I donāt blame you for being concerned, especially seeing the number of high profile hardware companies that have run out of money and let their customers down recently. Hopefully our recent financing announcement gives you comfort on that front, but we realize that until we deliver the product youāve paid for, we havenāt fully earned your trust and support.
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There you go - you just went and jinxed it.
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I didnāt see Dan deny my projection 
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as @marmak3261 said, the Proofgrade materials and design catalog have been core aspects of the business plan from day one. As such, that means they also had their own dedicated funding budgeted to pay for the extra heads on payroll specifically to deliiver those perks in parallel with the core hardware and cloud platform project streams that will give us the laser and its cloud-based platform to use our own designs on our own sourced materials if we wish.
Having read every single post in this entire forum, I have come to appreciate the huge potential value of Glowforge going to the trouble of custom-sourcing materials that will be not only be guaranteed to work great, but will also be masked on both sides for cleaner results, and have codes printed on that masking that will tell the Glowforge exactly what settings will provide perfect results.
Also, regarding the design catalog, it will eventually allow us to upload our own designs for sale too, so there is a potential upside there even for those of us that have no desire to ever buy plans from it.
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FWIW, Iām figuring an average ship rate (once things are going) of 100 units a day just based on the time it could take to (very carefully) final-inspect and box a precision mechanical object that size and weight. Which gives you a ship-start day well before thanksgiving, even if Iām off by a factor of two or three.
But also, when you have a cloud-driven machine, version numbers start being a sort of weird thing. (I wonder, for example, whether some people will be allowed to simply point their GF at dev.glowforge.com instead of release.glowforge.com and get a different user experienceā¦)