I ordered one, wish I could pick it up in person instead of paying the shipping. Particularly interested in seeing what one can do with just a pen and skipping the computer design stage...
You can always order a Chinese made laser cutter which has 80% of the features and 100% of the most important ones. If you go this route, get it from a dealer in your country with a good reputation so you can get service and support.
This would be a nightmare to make happen, you would need to bribe so many people to get a shipment here that your profit would be unworthy and also make you a criminal or you can run it by the lawn and never get the items or pay 100% taxes over them + their shipping costs making a machine like this cost U$5000,00
There are lots of customs fees involved that are not considered taxes per-se. But let's ignore them and look at taxes:
You get a 60% import tax right off the bat (this applies over the product cost, the aforementioned fees AND shipping). Then, there's ICMS, which varies by state (let's say, 12%). There's also IPI, which is variable according to the product and I'm not sure where a laser cutter would fit in. Also PIS (1.65%), COFINS (7.6%) and IOF since it probably involves currency exchange (0.38%).
Speaking of that... there's the unfavorable exchange rate. Today, the real hit a high of BRL 4.23 for one USD. It was 2.50 something one year ago, and then the economy blew up.
I'm not going to the trouble of trying to calculate the final price, without the importer's markup, but it will be HIGH. Good luck marketing this thing to anything other than medium businesses. And that one year from now. You'll spend like an year incorporating your company and navigating the customs law mess.
There are other options, of course. Manufacturing locally would bypass a lot of taxes (and generate others). But then you could negotiate deals with local authorities in exchange for job creation and some strategic dinners. That sort of stuff. The opportunity cost of doing that is just huge and, by the time you managed all that, you'd be profitable in several other countries already.
Then you'll have to deal with the crappy transportation infrastructure. Forget shipping things by train, you'll have to use trucks. Delivery estimates of 30 business days are not uncommon at all.
My advice? Stay away from Brazil. Even more so this year. There's a reason investors are pulling money out of the country.
> There's a reason investors are pulling money out of the country.
Fun fact, they mostly aren't anymore. (Go figure. I guess the country is so crazy that nobody knows what to do.) That isn't stopping the Real from falling anyway.
In the video, at about 13:40 they reveal that to print you have to use the web interface which runs "On Googles Cloud".
I would not like the interface to my own printer to be "In the Google cloud". Does that mean when the company goes out of business, the printer is bricked?
And right after, they admit that they plan adding paid services. Oh oh. How will thesed paid services be announced? I can imagine how. Whenever I want to print, this thing will bug me to pay for some fancy addon.
And privacy? Goes right out of the window. Everything I print would go through all kinds of hands. The manufacturer of this printer, Google, my carrier and who knows who.
And what about security? This is probably a full blown computer they want me to give access to my lan and internet connection. Who guarantees it gets security updates?
Good question, I _think_ the ideas is the exact opposite -- you're not depending on Glowforge UI to be backed by a startups servers, the software runs on google cloud instead. Pros and cons, obviously, but I think the main pro is (like a Tesla) the machine's performance and usability can be improved without you installing any new software. As far as dependencies go, google's probably the best possible choice.
That part is, in my experience, vanishingly cheap if you're not doing high rate DB transactions. The whole thing could clearly be moved to other managed hosting providers or private servers, and I'm sure ultimately you can run a somewhat constrained version on the device itself. That said, launching in the cloud seems like the right choice temporally (time-to-market) and economically. Focusing (sorry) on building the actual device seems like a reasonable choice to me.
> you're not depending on Glowforge UI to be backed by a startups servers, the software runs on google cloud instead.
What? Who is going to pay that bill? For example, Glowforge goes out of business... Google isn't going to continue to host and maintain that software out of the kindness of their hearts.
> but I think the main pro is (like a Tesla) the machine's performance and usability can be improved without you installing any new software.
What does the UI being web-based, and "in the cloud" have to do with it's firmware?
For example, if the UI wasn't hosted on some google server, instead existed within the device accessible via WiFi (like a router) nothing you've said here would be any different... other than the user being able to decide themselves if they _want_ their device updated.
A bit off-topic, but you gave me an idea: What if Google did guarantee to host stuff forever when startups go out of business? It would eliminate customers' reservations in cases like this, and hence eliminate business reservations about going all-in on cloud services. The increased business could potentially more than cover Google's cost.
The trick would be the care and feeding of the software. But as the industry moves to more immutable infrastructure -- especially stuff like AWS lambda and JAWS -- this will become less of an issue.
Not defend something needlessly cloud based, but this:
>but I think the main pro is (like a Tesla) the machine's performance and usability can be improved without you installing any new software.
is likely referring to them updating their cloud infrastructure, not the machine. By centralizing the processing and whatever else, they can ignore some local machine updating.
Its not worth the massive drawbacks, but its likely the truth wrapped in that marketing speak.
It's a very polished product, and the "pen" mode is a cool idea. To me, they're targeting an odd demographic, Makers who can afford expensive toys / tools, but also want a very friendly, hands-off interface. I would have expected the Maker camp to be ordering ~ $700 40-50W laser cutters from Shenzhen. I suppose the Glowforge would be pretty great in a school setting, though.
I'm a maker. Tell me more about this $700 Shenzhen laser cutter? I googled it and I'm coming up with a few things, but only very small $400 units and very big expensive units.
Pretty sure they are talking about the K40 "blue box" laser. I have heard they require some mods to get working properly but for the price some think they are worth it.
Just search 40w laser engraver on ebay and you should get several hits around $400. Mine is working great after some mods.
Mods:
~$25 for 8ft ground rod and wire
~ $35 for 24V DC power supply( includes 5 volt supply because I blow out the DC section of the board it come with)
~ $45 Raspberry Pi CNC Board + drivers
~ $35 Raspberry PI
I can scp dxf files to the raspberry then rdp or ssh -X to open bCNC. Open the file and click Run. bCNC just added laser support so the setup is trivial.
I'm not too sure on the cutting power though. I have done paper, leather and cardboard but the 1/8in plywood I have tried is too thick.
I also had to put a 3904 transistor and a resistor in the board to make the laser on signal be sinking.
You can also get a membership to techshop.ws where they have cutters among MANY other items.
https://www.noisebridge.net/ hacker space on Mission in SF also had a fairly large 40W cutter... It was not setup for a while - but I think its working now... and you can use that one pretty much free (donate to the space though is a good idea)
Laser cutters are by far the most popular tools at tech shop. Reservations typically fill up 2-3 weeks in advance. Having a hobby machine at home for smaller or recurring jobs could save a lot of time.
CEO/Founder of Glowforge here. There are a bunch of lasers billed as 40W on ebay and amazon, but please look really carefully before you buy one. The mostly-harmless part is the lousy interface, overrated tube, and inability to cut (the motion controller only supports raster mode). The worrisome parts are the ungrounded case, high voltage wires that are usually but not always firmly attached, and lack of an interlock or other safety precautions.
If you're excited about making a laser work, they're a worthwhile project. If you want to use a laser to make things, you probably want something that is closer to working out of the box. (Speaking as someone who shipped 770 lbs of laser from China, then spent way too long getting it to work... sometimes.)
Which, on one such cutter I used, involved having to pre-process DXF files through Corel Draw (!!) in order to get the cutter software to read them at all. In my case, that meant a workflow of:
CAD software
-- export-to-DXF
pre-process in Illustrator
-- laser kerf allowance
-- layout parts on material
pre-process in Corel Draw
-- load and reexport the DXF, just 'cause
load in cutter software
-- mark up paths for cutter parameters
(speed, power, cut/raster mode)
For comparison, Ponoko cuts out the last two pieces of software. AI or Inkscape can be used for all required workflow steps. The (necessary) tradeoff is that you have less control: only "cut" or "engrave" to parameters pre-determined for the requested materials.
First, determine the kerf of your cutter. For service bureaus like Ponoko, they may be able to tell you the kerf for the cutter and material you'll be using. Otherwise do some test cuts, e.g. a set of 1cm squares, and measure the average kerf using a good digital caliper.
From there in reasonably recent versions of Illustrator, select your path, then use Object > Path > Offset Path...
In the Offset Path dialog, enter your measured kerf value. E.g. I've been working with a 0.19mm kerf lately, so I would enter half that in the dialog (literally ".19mm/2") and confirm.
A few notes:
* Make sure your path is fully joined (select everything then Object > Path > Join) before using Offset Path. If you zoom in and see your path looks like a series of disjoint rectangles, it wasn't joined; start over.
* IMPORTANT!: Offset Path creates an additional path, instead of modifying the selected one. At this scale, this is impossible to see. You'll need to zoom waaay in to see the pair of paths, ungroup them, then select and delete the inner one. If you don't, you'll end-up double cutting the same path, which can be a good way to make fire. :-/ (Ponoko checks for and will usually flag these kind of errors.)
You're right! Removing workflow steps is key to allow anyone to access to laser cutting, but there is no inexpensive and intuitive dedicated cad-cam software out there to do this job. That's why we developped a cloud-based easy-to-use editor with a bunch of features and much more if you want to share and sell your designs. BTW we already use a Speedy Trotec 300 but this machine could fit on our desktop.
It's a custom glass DC tube with some cool engineering to improve the mode quality to TEM00, which gives us tighter spot size / higher power density. Similar effect to cranking up the power, except you also get tighter kerf and you don't have to make the tube longer.
This one I actually know -- biohazards depend on more than just wattage -- spot size, wavelength, pulse characteristics, etc, all go into it. I think you really compare them based on the Poynting vector. Disclosure: I'm a GF backer and am a card carrying physicist who had this question on his qualifying exam in grad school. https://www.rli.com/resources/articles/classification.aspx
Yeah, I just saw that on their youtube video; the sides can remain open during operation to allow etching/cutting of materials larger than the enclosure. That means human access is possible, so therefore the class IV.
(ceo/cofounder here)
You're right - it's the passthrough. CDRH is very strict about what could count as human access. We have some clever interlocks in place around the passthrough but if an examiner can place a mirror in the interior and measure laser output above the threshold without triggering the interlock, you're Class IV.
I am surprised it can cut paper without causing ignition.
I wonder how many of the projects shown were created using the "basic" ($2K) version and how many were produced using the pro ($4K) version?
I will say their early bird prices make these compelling for small business/etsy setups. However once they go to full price, I don't know if that will remain as true. It would take a LOT of wallets to break even at a $4K buy-in for the "basic" version.
PS - We live in an exciting world. Between 3D printers and these, you really can do more at home than ever before. And this type of technology is bringing tooling prices down massively even if you have it fabricated.
PPS - Looking at the material costs on their page, and looking at how much these items sell for on etsy right now ($39 inc. free postage), you'd have to sell over one hundred hardback skins for a Macbook Pro just to break even (and that's ignoring many of the hidden costs of running a business, like accountant, licensing, your salary, etc).
(cofounder/ceo here)
I don't remember which sample items we made on which model, but everything you see is printable on the basic model. For example, the monitor stand and dollhouse don't have pieces larger than 12x20.
A 100 unit break even point is incredible low. Have you read many of the write ups on product based Kickstarter campaigns. From what I have read most break even point are into the 1,000 plus units if you have to account for fabricating molds or dies. Then these mold and dies can only be used fro one project.
That is the beauty of 3D printing, laser etc. You have one tool that can be used to fab hundreds of designs or product with no tooling costs.
> I am surprised it can cut paper without causing ignition.
As a kid, I had a lot of difficulty trying to ignite paper with lenses under the sun (white notebook paper). I then gave up and used the lenses for cutting instead. So I'm not that surprised.
To this day I wonder what would be the correct set of conditions that would make it easier to combust. I remember trying black paint - that only made the cutting part easier.
I had really no problem using a magnifying glass to burn printer paper as a kid, as long as it was the summer, trying to do that in the winter was for some reason impossible.
I have a laser cutter and I was surprised as well that it doesn't generally catch things on fire. It cuts through cardboard like it's not even there. It's only harder materials like wood that you get any noticeable flame at all, and that problem largely goes away if you use an air compressor (which also serves to blow smoke out of the way of the beam).
That said, it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the machine while it's running.
Laser cutters generate smoke (with possibly toxic particles). They have air extraction attached to them for that reason. No air extraction on this model?
Take a look at the specs -- you can either vent them out a window or buy the air filter (which I'm guessing is a fancy charcoal scrubber, don't know for sure).
I want... NO.... I NEED this! The price seems surprisingly reasonable for the amount of household items you could create that you "Forgot to get from the store."
Thank you! I was lucky enough to have an industrial laser in my garage for a few years and was amazed at what it could do, and how miserably hard it was to do it. Hopefully we'll let lots of folks experience the first and none the second.
After watching that video I feel like they should do a promo with Etsy. Also can't help but think about Cory Doctorow's "Makers", sci-fi being slowly ushered into our lives :)
(ceo/cofounder here)
There are lots of folks doing bathymetric maps with lasers; I don't know who was first to it. We generated ours from scratch from NOAA data, but owe them (or whoever did it first) a debt of inspiration.
This looks like a decent laser but I thought I'd post a few thoughts about this package which might give a potential buyer pause.
First, the main unique feature I see is the built in camera which apparently gives you a preview of cut/engraved finished part on your computer screen with the material as it's positioned inside the machine. This also (apparently, it's not clear), allows you to correct for misaligned material inside the machine. These are nice features, but it's perfectly possible to cut and engrave without them.
One big problem with operating this inside your home is the fumes. Now, they do mention that the base unit needs to be vented to the outside. What this means is that your neighbors (and you, if the wind is right) will have to smell the exhaust from this machine. It's not a nice smell if you're cutting acrylic. Though I personally got used to the scent of vaporized acrylic over time, your neighbors might not be so inclined.
So they also offer a $500 add-on ($1000 regular price) to filter the air so you can exhaust inside. The add on is smaller than the already small laser cutter. This is quite a feat and I would really like to know how they got it to work. You see, the fumes/smoke from a laser cutter can really clog up a particulate filter pretty quickly. Wood produces wood smoke, and acrylic vapor is quite sticky when it settles. So you have to have a powerful pump to draw the fumes through the filter. Then you need a good amount of activated charcoal to get rid of the smelly stuff.
If you look at the professional model air filters, they're $2000+ and you have to buy filters and media regularly.
Laser cutters get messy inside, so if you buy one, be prepared to clean it out regularly to keep the optical and mechanical components clean.
Problems with operation can START A FIRE, so be prepared to watch the machine 100% of the time while it's cutting.
Every issue you mentioned apart from the terrible fumes are problems that already exist in one's home with cooking in your own home, and people, seeing the convenience of cooking in their homes, have adapted to it. Regarding fumes actually, the smell from my neighbor's cooking isn't always to my liking either, but, perhaps, burnt plastic might be worse and equally undesirable to all people.
I think one thing that was not clear are the fumes are extremely toxic. Rarely do you cook where the fumes could make you go unconscious or cause long term health effects. If you dont believe me, check out:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1475175/]
I guess that makes sense. I thought of the smell as nauseous but being dangerously unhealthy (than breathing the same concentration smoke from a fire, I'm assuming is the comparison) makes it involve different levels of health issues. I'd suppose they'd have to make the buyers sign waivers, huh, otherwise they have a number of civil class-action suits waiting--from which they lose anyway since a waiver would make the cutter much less attractive.
(founder/CEO here)
I vented a 60W chinese laser out my window for a year in the suburbs, but I've learned never to underestimate what neighbors may complain complain about. The air filter is definitely a good idea. If you do the math on the volume, and compare it to the actual volume of the filter of e.g. a Purex, you'll find it's similar. Almost half of the volume of the Purex is in the fans or open airspace; we have the advantage of a ton of airflow from the Glowforge itself, so the filter needs proportionately less. We also have a sealed (basic) or almost-sealed (pro) case so it's easier to build up negative pressure and move the exhaust through.
Cleaning stinks, and wrecks alignment - the tube and turning mirrors are completely sealed, including the tube output, so there's just one flat window to wipe clean (and it unscrews for easy replacement). The head has a window and purge air to keep it clean too.
We're mitigating a lot of the risk of fire by avoiding trouble situations in software (e.g. not cutting a piece of material where the dimensions make it an effective wick, detecting obstacles on the bed, accelerators to detect problems quickly) but you're right that you don't want to run it unattended.
Have some cartridge of CO2 inside that is getting released in such scenario? There's not much volume inside so it should do the job. IANAF, just wondering.
For a while I've been wondering if you could flood the chamber of a laser cutter with CO_2 routinely, not just to prevent fires but to prevent the scorching that laser cutting leaves on wood. If that would consume too much CO_2, would it be workable to instead spray it topically onto the point of the cut, a bit like the inert shielding gases that some forms of arc welding use?
Air assist is a classic thing on many decent laser cutters, especially for the reasons mentioned. On our lasersaur for example, a builtin air nozzle blow compressed air at the place where the laser beam hits the material being cut...
On reflection this probably can't work, as apparently wood melts only at stupidly high temperatures. Though maybe a lower temperature to embrittle the carbon would be enough?
Yes. Actually both intake and exhaust fans. Both of those are under software control, so they only run at the speed required for the job. Then the $500 air filter option has its own internal fans to assist with air, also under software control.
If you use the filter, there's nothing else hanging off the back of the device except a power cord. (My old laser had a squirrel cage fan, an aquarium pump, and a chiller tethered to it at all times!)
Munching on wood with an Epilog laser will produce copious volumes of smoke, and the air assist and 400CFM blower are not trivial pieces of equipment to embed in a unit to properly quell any fires and actually extract all the air needed.
My air assist is small enough that I could see a similar machine engineered to fit into the bottom part of this product. As for exhaust, you can get surprisingly good air flow with certain low CFM setups - my local makerspace uses a computer fan that does something with pressure that I don't understand. I don't think the goal of the exhaust is to quell a fire but to move smoke away from the beam and outside.
Is it true the machine requires connection to internet or your cloud to cut or engrave? I was about to order a Pro until I read this in the comments. I expect to be able to use this machine with my laptop running some program and "send to laser", no internet connection required.
Just speculating here, but it could be similar to how Google such do voice controls. Meaning that there is some processing that needs to take place that is offloaded to some server cluster somewhere, rather than attempting to do it locally.
Cofounder/CEO here, just finished with Makercon and catching up.
The Glowforge does require a cloud connection to operate. We use cloud vs. local a host of reasons including the motion planner, alignment, image recognition, and faster feature development.
But based on the excellent point made here that nobody wants a paperweight if we fall off the globe, we decided to make a change. We're going to do a GPL release of the firmware so people can do whatever they want, including porting offline functionality. You buy it, it's yours, you should get to do what you want with it.
1. When you mention planner, etc, does this imply the cloud service is involved not just in a prep phase, but actively during the control loop while the device is cutting? The latter would be worrisome to me.
2. Will you be able to elaborate at all on the functionality of the firmware (and/or provide protocol documentation for it) prior to ship? I'm not sure how comfortable I am pre-ordering without understanding just how much work there is between the device as delivered and an actual, functional, standalone cutter.
I see on the blog that modifying the firmware invalidates warranty coverage. This seems like another argument for protocol docs and/or ability to usefully have at least one cut path that does not tie you to an online service or nuke your warranty.
As always, HN never fails to make sure the top comment is negative in some way.
Dan, I think this is a phenomenal product. I didn't know much about laser cutters and their potential, and you did a great job making this accessible. I wish you luck and hope to see your company grow.
I'd consider the original comment a positive contribution. Just because it can be seen as having a negative tone, this one of caution, it is backed up with a heft of substance explaining the thought process behind it. It also resulted in another informative response from the founder. That's a good thing we should encourage.
A negative comment is one that doesn't contribute anything. A negative generalization about a community that doesn't provide an explanation could be seen as an example of a negative comment.
I think this is part of the reason I actually very much appreciate the comments section on HN. Not for negativity, but because often the top comment is a good summation of the caveats to whatever's behind a given link. People selling products are not wont to tell me why their product might not be as great as it seems, unless required to by law. Even then, only in tiny print.
I'm certainly not an expert in many areas (Lasers for one), including many of the areas that these products pop up in, so when something seems too good to be true (or if I happen to have said expertise) the first thing I do is hop over to comments to see what the rest of the community has to say.
I always try to take both links and comments with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism and try to come to my own conclusions. That's not easy to do if I only get one side of the story and I don't happen to have years of experience in the relevant fields.
True, you make good points. I just think in this case, the product warrants some kudos as the top comment. This is probably in the top 1% tier of quality startups.
Negative comments are appropriate in this case. This looked so amazing, but the comments here point out the very important fact that this requires access to the internet to function, something that the co-founder so far hasn't addressed in the comments despite numerous requests for an answer.
Also, I don't disagree with your comment, I just hate that the top comment always seems to put a damper on every truly promising launch or product - with Dropbox's launch being a famous example.
I didn't want to be negative or put this product down. I just wanted to be sure the people who are looking at this to know what they are getting into. The points I made about this machine could apply to ANY laser cutter.
As a class of machine, they're just not as easy to use as, say, an inkjet printer. As I said, the camera feature looks nice, and according to danshapiro, they've done a lot to help with the maintenance issues by enclosing the optics.
I personally think its a pretty cool product. However, their insistence on having everything routed through the cloud doesn't seem appealing to me. If they close down or even if Google has some sort of service interruption, this thing becomes nothing more than a paper weight.
After watching their video on tested, I think you are spot on with the concerns. It looks like the laser printers does generate some nasty fumes [1] and there is the section where you actually see the wood catching on fire [2]. Not sure if plastic should have been the choice for the enclosure.
Regardless, cool product but could have been better.
Yep, was about to shell out for a Pro, but now I'm going to wait for #1 version 2.0 for them to work out all the kinks and #2 this cloud connection business. I refuse to buy any equipment that doesn't work if it's disconnected.
I suppose one way to solve this problem is to make sure that as much of the machine as possible in the cutting area is made of non-flammable material. Even if a fire starts it won't spread. Not possible with this one though, as the housing seems to be made of plastic.
I have a 40W hobbyist laser cutter. It's fun, and a great tool for various projects, like making board games[1,2]. That said, sometimes materials inside the machine catch fire, and sometimes the beam reflects or dwells on a section of the metal enclosure. It's interesting that they've chosen to make the entire (?) enclosure out of plastic, itself a combustible material. I get why they went with plastic (cheaper to fabricate once you have the molds, lighter to ship, perhaps better dimensional accuracy than cheap sheet metal), but it does not seem particularly safe. The also seem to gloss over the need to ventilate the machine. Plastic fumes are nasty to breathe, glue-bonded wood (think thin plywood) can release formaldehyde fumes, leather may be dyed with heavy metals. What the laser doesn't cause to combust cleanly, it vaporizes. You don't want those emissions in your house of office, and you want them vented away from the optical components as quickly as possible so there is no deposition onto mirror or lens surfaces.
Another benefit of metal enclosures is shielding the power supplies of these things. High-voltage laser power supplies are noisy, and when you PWM them, they can cause quite a bit of interference. Metal enclosures at least help to attenuate RF emissions.
The "macro camera" is a clever addition for closed-loop optical control (if it is being used for that). Reminds me of attaching an optical mouse sensor the the lens sled.
I have an older one from Full Spectrum[1], from when they were adding their own control PCBs to generic units imported from China. The newer ones they have look nicer. There are a few other options on the market now, so it's probably worth shopping around. Larger cutting areas are nice, if for no other reason than that they limit the number of cuts you have to make on raw materials to get them to fit into the machine.
I made my own recirculating laser tube cooler using desktop PC water cooling components[2].
Beyond board games, they're useful for making tools for other projects. Need a drill guide with precise spacing? No problem, cut one out on the laser cutter. Need to prototype a coarse-pitch circuit board but don't want to wait for OSHPark or pay for a quick-turn fab? Ablate black paint off a Cu-clad board and chemical etch. Want to de-cap IC packages? You can, with some care. Interested in prototyping microfluidic structures? Sandwich some cut sheets of double-sided tape between acrylic sheet. Need to make a quick enclosure for a project? Design a box [3,4]. Cut the sides out of acrylic, and bond with dichloromethane (with ventilation!). It's great for making fixture components for things like robotics since you an easily include holes for machine screws.
They're also fun for cutting leather, cloth, etching aluminum laptops, making gifts, etc.
If you don't have access to nice commercial CAD software, DraftSight is a free AutoCAD clone that works fine for 2D drawings[5]. Otherwise, Inkscape works well for 2D, and for 3D, Rhino[6] has an affordable educational license that permits commercial use.
I have their 5th-generation machine (now just called their "H-series" machine) with the 45 watt upgrade, and am pretty happy with it so far. Their software has a few quirks, but nothing I can't work around.
I've got a Full Spectrum Hobby 5th gen (20"x12" bed). I'm very happy with it, but the build quality is not as good something you'd get from Epilog. Of course, it's a significant fraction of the price, so it's worth it for me.
Thanks! JavaScript manipulates the SVG files. That's one file type usable by the laser cutting machine. Due to how the machine operates, it's a mixture of vector cutting lines for the fine lines and tile edges, and bitmap images for the raster fill and shading. The vector lines are easy to change in color by adjusting DOM attributes, while for the fill images I change the colors on a pixel-by-pixel basis before spitting out the finished SVG files in a client side-made zip file.
This was helpful because beyond the laser power settings, it took some fiddling to get the right shades of gray for cutting depths that worked with the multilayer plywood I was using (some layers are darker than others; had to make it look good). The files can also of course be colored for printing.
The different regions are segmented by their colors in the original files, which were created via Inkscape with outline vector lines over bitmap fill images. The lines were drawn by hand by my girlfriend and I using Inkscape, based on a purchased copy of Carcassonne we have. The images were made by rendering the outline SVGs to PNGs, filling in regions using GIMP, then reimporting them into Inkscape, and overlaying the vector outlines.
For meeple, she laboriously cut them out by hand from Sculpey clay. A cookie cutter would have been ideal but it took her less time to cut the figures than for me to bend copper flashing into the shape of a person or to devise a way to extrude the figures.
Also, in case that URL goes down, here is a link to the tile generator on GitHub pages:
It's not just cloud connected, it's cloud dependent. It requires internet access and their cloud services to function at all. That's kind of disappointing.
I said so in a comment half an hour ago, but it immediately got downvoted to oblivion. Meanwhile the comment seems to slowly recover.
Nowhere on their website they say so. I would be really pissed if I bought a printer for thousands of dollars, unpack it and then realize I cannot use it. Letting it use my internet connection and being dependant on the services of a company to use it would not be an option for me.
What a shame... I am in the market for a home laser to replace the Epilog I use (at a makerspace), and this looks amazing. I won't be buying it if it's cloud-only, though. :(
It's not just disappointing, it's stupefying. Why would my drill (or my compressor or my band saw) need to be on the Internet in order to function ?
Also, there's a lot of overlap between people who have the extra space/building/shop to properly run equipment like this and people that have spotty rural Internet.
It probably has to do with how people/VCs don't see selling hardware alone as a super profitable model on it's own, and want a cloud dependence to sell you more stuff or to sell your data.
The things that they show (running a web site with lots of UX, slicing, image processing, materials data, catalog of customizable designs, etc.) fit pretty well into a powerful web site/service with a small CPU in the laser cutter. Adding a powerful CPU, etc, would add to cost and complexity - it is much easier to run a web site than to support thousands,of users' local installs, etc. Though i agree that makes the device dependent on their service, that's becoming a pretty common tradeoff these days.
Yeah, recently purchased an ePaper dev module(electric imp). The specs looked cool and I wanted to get my hands on this technology for while. Well, surprise surprise the module can only be programmed via a web-based (cloud) IDE that connects to the device ... no other way around it. So basically if the servers are down, so is your device (in the case of ePaper at least). Not for me.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments. That, combined with snark about new work, is something we try to avoid on HN. Of course, there's a legit point about cloud-connected products here too and you're welcome to comment about that substantively.
It's true that there are other unsubstantive comments in the thread, and many more elsewhere on HN, but we can't reply to them all. Our intention is absolutely not to pick on anyone personally, but to provide signals to the community about the level of discourse we're all going for here.
Please don't post passive-aggressive comments intended to control how I choose to interact with the community here. The upvote and downvote arrows are the correct method of expressing approval or disapproval.
FYI: dang is an HN admin, so has additional tools besides the upvote and downvote arrows, up to and including nuking comments and banning users. A comment before it gets to that point is a courtesy, I think.
He's welcome to continue down-thread and copy/paste his comment to me as a reply to every 2nd or third comment in this thread if that's his intent. I stand by my statement and am utterly unconcerned by any consequences that might come of it.
The TL;DR is that she was part of creating a toxic environment within the company, shipped a product they knew was defective (Makerbot fifth generation), misled the shareholders (of Stratasys) and ultimately cost Stratasys hundreds of millions.
I can confirm that the Makerbot 5gen is a defective product. We have one at the office gathering dust after trying to make it work for a few months. It is beyond hope.
That's a nice unit, and adding a camera is a big step forward. More CNC machines should have cameras to aid in alignment. I'd really like to have a camera with high magnification on a CNC mill, rigidly mounted a known distance from the spindle, and cross-hairs on the monitor.
I've worked with Laser cutters and, unless they have fixed things, you really don't want to be cutting items--especially paper and cardboard--without industrial "shop" ventilation. And many times I've set my work on fire.
Looks like a great toy until you go through comments here. Honestly would have bought this for my woman, since she's into crafts and stuff, but cloud-only cutting/engraving, comments on fumes and filters + dealing with customs (if they even shipping int) quickly changed my mind. I've seen laser engravers on kickstarter before, hope to see more machines that do not require clouds to cut/etch a damn thing.
I really feel like if there are enough of these out there and the company somehow decides to brick all of them (not that likely IMHO) that someone will be able to come up with an open source solution for controlling it. I'd like to know what their privacy policy is but I'm not particularly worried about it becoming a multi-thousand dollar hunk of plastic.
I do wonder why the pre-order price is SO much cheaper than the actual price. At pre-order it's a still. At regular price it's kinda a bit meh.
It's easy to say bring the design "to local workshop to cut", they are available in US/CA/Europe, but finding one asia or africa, or even smaller european city is hard if not impossible.
This is going to be epic for schools and print-shops. I think only hardcore enthusiasts will want a home-home version of this tech, but I've spent enough time with paper-cutters and cutting out letter shapes that this is really cool.
Also, the boardgame industry can prototype cards much better with this - printing out Catan-like hex-tiles and the like.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?t=292&v=0R3mMUsHFvU
"No, I have a laser!"
(I do wonder what the costs of leather and fake leather are, and what the market for fancy laser-etched wallets is...)
Is making a leather wallet as nearly-impossible as he claims? http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-a-leather-wallet...
The video feels like infomercial schtick.
This would be a nightmare to make happen, you would need to bribe so many people to get a shipment here that your profit would be unworthy and also make you a criminal or you can run it by the lawn and never get the items or pay 100% taxes over them + their shipping costs making a machine like this cost U$5000,00
There are lots of customs fees involved that are not considered taxes per-se. But let's ignore them and look at taxes:
You get a 60% import tax right off the bat (this applies over the product cost, the aforementioned fees AND shipping). Then, there's ICMS, which varies by state (let's say, 12%). There's also IPI, which is variable according to the product and I'm not sure where a laser cutter would fit in. Also PIS (1.65%), COFINS (7.6%) and IOF since it probably involves currency exchange (0.38%).
Speaking of that... there's the unfavorable exchange rate. Today, the real hit a high of BRL 4.23 for one USD. It was 2.50 something one year ago, and then the economy blew up.
I'm not going to the trouble of trying to calculate the final price, without the importer's markup, but it will be HIGH. Good luck marketing this thing to anything other than medium businesses. And that one year from now. You'll spend like an year incorporating your company and navigating the customs law mess.
There are other options, of course. Manufacturing locally would bypass a lot of taxes (and generate others). But then you could negotiate deals with local authorities in exchange for job creation and some strategic dinners. That sort of stuff. The opportunity cost of doing that is just huge and, by the time you managed all that, you'd be profitable in several other countries already.
Then you'll have to deal with the crappy transportation infrastructure. Forget shipping things by train, you'll have to use trucks. Delivery estimates of 30 business days are not uncommon at all.
My advice? Stay away from Brazil. Even more so this year. There's a reason investors are pulling money out of the country.
Disclaimer: I'm Brazilian.
Fun fact, they mostly aren't anymore. (Go figure. I guess the country is so crazy that nobody knows what to do.) That isn't stopping the Real from falling anyway.
I would not like the interface to my own printer to be "In the Google cloud". Does that mean when the company goes out of business, the printer is bricked?
And right after, they admit that they plan adding paid services. Oh oh. How will thesed paid services be announced? I can imagine how. Whenever I want to print, this thing will bug me to pay for some fancy addon.
And privacy? Goes right out of the window. Everything I print would go through all kinds of hands. The manufacturer of this printer, Google, my carrier and who knows who.
And what about security? This is probably a full blown computer they want me to give access to my lan and internet connection. Who guarantees it gets security updates?
I've not met a precision cutting or metrology tool where we didn't need to get low-level access to the hardware to get simple things done....
What? Who is going to pay that bill? For example, Glowforge goes out of business... Google isn't going to continue to host and maintain that software out of the kindness of their hearts.
> but I think the main pro is (like a Tesla) the machine's performance and usability can be improved without you installing any new software.
What does the UI being web-based, and "in the cloud" have to do with it's firmware?
For example, if the UI wasn't hosted on some google server, instead existed within the device accessible via WiFi (like a router) nothing you've said here would be any different... other than the user being able to decide themselves if they _want_ their device updated.
The trick would be the care and feeding of the software. But as the industry moves to more immutable infrastructure -- especially stuff like AWS lambda and JAWS -- this will become less of an issue.
No it wouldn't. I still don't want to depend on a remote service to use an alliance this expensive. Internet connections can be unreliable.
>but I think the main pro is (like a Tesla) the machine's performance and usability can be improved without you installing any new software.
is likely referring to them updating their cloud infrastructure, not the machine. By centralizing the processing and whatever else, they can ignore some local machine updating.
Its not worth the massive drawbacks, but its likely the truth wrapped in that marketing speak.
https://github.com/kallaballa/ctrl-cut
Time for some reverse engineering if you can only cut via Glowforge's servers...
x
http://www.ebay.com/itm/High-Precise-40W-CO2-Laser-Engraving...
Also - if you click on Shipping -- it says "free shipping" then it says "$300 shipping"
Which is it?
Come on man, it says right there.
Thanks though
Mods: ~$25 for 8ft ground rod and wire ~ $35 for 24V DC power supply( includes 5 volt supply because I blow out the DC section of the board it come with) ~ $45 Raspberry Pi CNC Board + drivers ~ $35 Raspberry PI
I can scp dxf files to the raspberry then rdp or ssh -X to open bCNC. Open the file and click Run. bCNC just added laser support so the setup is trivial.
I'm not too sure on the cutting power though. I have done paper, leather and cardboard but the 1/8in plywood I have tried is too thick.
I also had to put a 3904 transistor and a resistor in the board to make the laser on signal be sinking.
https://www.noisebridge.net/ hacker space on Mission in SF also had a fairly large 40W cutter... It was not setup for a while - but I think its working now... and you can use that one pretty much free (donate to the space though is a good idea)
If you're excited about making a laser work, they're a worthwhile project. If you want to use a laser to make things, you probably want something that is closer to working out of the box. (Speaking as someone who shipped 770 lbs of laser from China, then spent way too long getting it to work... sometimes.)
Which, on one such cutter I used, involved having to pre-process DXF files through Corel Draw (!!) in order to get the cutter software to read them at all. In my case, that meant a workflow of:
For comparison, Ponoko cuts out the last two pieces of software. AI or Inkscape can be used for all required workflow steps. The (necessary) tradeoff is that you have less control: only "cut" or "engrave" to parameters pre-determined for the requested materials.From there in reasonably recent versions of Illustrator, select your path, then use Object > Path > Offset Path...
In the Offset Path dialog, enter your measured kerf value. E.g. I've been working with a 0.19mm kerf lately, so I would enter half that in the dialog (literally ".19mm/2") and confirm.
A few notes:
* Make sure your path is fully joined (select everything then Object > Path > Join) before using Offset Path. If you zoom in and see your path looks like a series of disjoint rectangles, it wasn't joined; start over.
* IMPORTANT!: Offset Path creates an additional path, instead of modifying the selected one. At this scale, this is impossible to see. You'll need to zoom waaay in to see the pair of paths, ungroup them, then select and delete the inner one. If you don't, you'll end-up double cutting the same path, which can be a good way to make fire. :-/ (Ponoko checks for and will usually flag these kind of errors.)
Cheers!
I wonder how many of the projects shown were created using the "basic" ($2K) version and how many were produced using the pro ($4K) version?
I will say their early bird prices make these compelling for small business/etsy setups. However once they go to full price, I don't know if that will remain as true. It would take a LOT of wallets to break even at a $4K buy-in for the "basic" version.
PS - We live in an exciting world. Between 3D printers and these, you really can do more at home than ever before. And this type of technology is bringing tooling prices down massively even if you have it fabricated.
PPS - Looking at the material costs on their page, and looking at how much these items sell for on etsy right now ($39 inc. free postage), you'd have to sell over one hundred hardback skins for a Macbook Pro just to break even (and that's ignoring many of the hidden costs of running a business, like accountant, licensing, your salary, etc).
As a kid, I had a lot of difficulty trying to ignite paper with lenses under the sun (white notebook paper). I then gave up and used the lenses for cutting instead. So I'm not that surprised.
To this day I wonder what would be the correct set of conditions that would make it easier to combust. I remember trying black paint - that only made the cutting part easier.
That said, it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the machine while it's running.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Custom-PCB-Prototyping-using...
My lab uses an industrial laser cutter a lot, and perspex fumes stink. We have a large extraction unit to capture the fumes.
Filters only capture a limited range of compounds too. Important to always check whether the filter can handle the material before cutting.
Thank you! I was lucky enough to have an industrial laser in my garage for a few years and was amazed at what it could do, and how miserably hard it was to do it. Hopefully we'll let lots of folks experience the first and none the second.
http://www.belowtheboat.com/
I've given those maps as gifts, and they're very nice quality. Is there any relationship between your companies? Are they using your laser cutter?
First, the main unique feature I see is the built in camera which apparently gives you a preview of cut/engraved finished part on your computer screen with the material as it's positioned inside the machine. This also (apparently, it's not clear), allows you to correct for misaligned material inside the machine. These are nice features, but it's perfectly possible to cut and engrave without them.
One big problem with operating this inside your home is the fumes. Now, they do mention that the base unit needs to be vented to the outside. What this means is that your neighbors (and you, if the wind is right) will have to smell the exhaust from this machine. It's not a nice smell if you're cutting acrylic. Though I personally got used to the scent of vaporized acrylic over time, your neighbors might not be so inclined.
So they also offer a $500 add-on ($1000 regular price) to filter the air so you can exhaust inside. The add on is smaller than the already small laser cutter. This is quite a feat and I would really like to know how they got it to work. You see, the fumes/smoke from a laser cutter can really clog up a particulate filter pretty quickly. Wood produces wood smoke, and acrylic vapor is quite sticky when it settles. So you have to have a powerful pump to draw the fumes through the filter. Then you need a good amount of activated charcoal to get rid of the smelly stuff.
If you look at the professional model air filters, they're $2000+ and you have to buy filters and media regularly.
Laser cutters get messy inside, so if you buy one, be prepared to clean it out regularly to keep the optical and mechanical components clean.
Problems with operation can START A FIRE, so be prepared to watch the machine 100% of the time while it's cutting.
Cleaning stinks, and wrecks alignment - the tube and turning mirrors are completely sealed, including the tube output, so there's just one flat window to wipe clean (and it unscrews for easy replacement). The head has a window and purge air to keep it clean too.
We're mitigating a lot of the risk of fire by avoiding trouble situations in software (e.g. not cutting a piece of material where the dimensions make it an effective wick, detecting obstacles on the bed, accelerators to detect problems quickly) but you're right that you don't want to run it unattended.
If you use the filter, there's nothing else hanging off the back of the device except a power cord. (My old laser had a squirrel cage fan, an aquarium pump, and a chiller tethered to it at all times!)
Munching on wood with an Epilog laser will produce copious volumes of smoke, and the air assist and 400CFM blower are not trivial pieces of equipment to embed in a unit to properly quell any fires and actually extract all the air needed.
I would also like very much to know the answer to this question.
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055330
The Glowforge does require a cloud connection to operate. We use cloud vs. local a host of reasons including the motion planner, alignment, image recognition, and faster feature development.
But based on the excellent point made here that nobody wants a paperweight if we fall off the globe, we decided to make a change. We're going to do a GPL release of the firmware so people can do whatever they want, including porting offline functionality. You buy it, it's yours, you should get to do what you want with it.
http://glowforge.com/gpl-licensed-open-source-firmware-for-g...
Thanks for the great feedback.
1. When you mention planner, etc, does this imply the cloud service is involved not just in a prep phase, but actively during the control loop while the device is cutting? The latter would be worrisome to me.
2. Will you be able to elaborate at all on the functionality of the firmware (and/or provide protocol documentation for it) prior to ship? I'm not sure how comfortable I am pre-ordering without understanding just how much work there is between the device as delivered and an actual, functional, standalone cutter.
I see on the blog that modifying the firmware invalidates warranty coverage. This seems like another argument for protocol docs and/or ability to usefully have at least one cut path that does not tie you to an online service or nuke your warranty.
Dan, I think this is a phenomenal product. I didn't know much about laser cutters and their potential, and you did a great job making this accessible. I wish you luck and hope to see your company grow.
A negative comment is one that doesn't contribute anything. A negative generalization about a community that doesn't provide an explanation could be seen as an example of a negative comment.
I'm certainly not an expert in many areas (Lasers for one), including many of the areas that these products pop up in, so when something seems too good to be true (or if I happen to have said expertise) the first thing I do is hop over to comments to see what the rest of the community has to say.
I always try to take both links and comments with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism and try to come to my own conclusions. That's not easy to do if I only get one side of the story and I don't happen to have years of experience in the relevant fields.
https://youtu.be/0R3mMUsHFvU?t=13m48s
Also, I don't disagree with your comment, I just hate that the top comment always seems to put a damper on every truly promising launch or product - with Dropbox's launch being a famous example.
As a class of machine, they're just not as easy to use as, say, an inkjet printer. As I said, the camera feature looks nice, and according to danshapiro, they've done a lot to help with the maintenance issues by enclosing the optics.
After watching their video on tested, I think you are spot on with the concerns. It looks like the laser printers does generate some nasty fumes [1] and there is the section where you actually see the wood catching on fire [2]. Not sure if plastic should have been the choice for the enclosure.
Regardless, cool product but could have been better.
[1] https://youtu.be/0R3mMUsHFvU?t=16m5s
[2] https://youtu.be/0R3mMUsHFvU?t=13m15s
I suppose one way to solve this problem is to make sure that as much of the machine as possible in the cutting area is made of non-flammable material. Even if a fire starts it won't spread. Not possible with this one though, as the housing seems to be made of plastic.
Another benefit of metal enclosures is shielding the power supplies of these things. High-voltage laser power supplies are noisy, and when you PWM them, they can cause quite a bit of interference. Metal enclosures at least help to attenuate RF emissions.
The "macro camera" is a clever addition for closed-loop optical control (if it is being used for that). Reminds me of attaching an optical mouse sensor the the lens sled.
1. https://igcdn-photos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/t51.28...
2. Make your own Carcassonne tiles! http://dev.tia.io/carcassonne_shading/
I made my own recirculating laser tube cooler using desktop PC water cooling components[2].
Beyond board games, they're useful for making tools for other projects. Need a drill guide with precise spacing? No problem, cut one out on the laser cutter. Need to prototype a coarse-pitch circuit board but don't want to wait for OSHPark or pay for a quick-turn fab? Ablate black paint off a Cu-clad board and chemical etch. Want to de-cap IC packages? You can, with some care. Interested in prototyping microfluidic structures? Sandwich some cut sheets of double-sided tape between acrylic sheet. Need to make a quick enclosure for a project? Design a box [3,4]. Cut the sides out of acrylic, and bond with dichloromethane (with ventilation!). It's great for making fixture components for things like robotics since you an easily include holes for machine screws.
They're also fun for cutting leather, cloth, etching aluminum laptops, making gifts, etc.
If you don't have access to nice commercial CAD software, DraftSight is a free AutoCAD clone that works fine for 2D drawings[5]. Otherwise, Inkscape works well for 2D, and for 3D, Rhino[6] has an affordable educational license that permits commercial use.
1. https://fslaser.com/Products/Lasers
2. https://github.com/tomkinsc/Laser-Cooler
3. http://boxmaker.connectionlab.org/
4. http://www.makercase.com/
5. http://www.3ds.com/products-services/draftsight-cad-software...
6. https://www.rhino3d.com/
This was helpful because beyond the laser power settings, it took some fiddling to get the right shades of gray for cutting depths that worked with the multilayer plywood I was using (some layers are darker than others; had to make it look good). The files can also of course be colored for printing.
The different regions are segmented by their colors in the original files, which were created via Inkscape with outline vector lines over bitmap fill images. The lines were drawn by hand by my girlfriend and I using Inkscape, based on a purchased copy of Carcassonne we have. The images were made by rendering the outline SVGs to PNGs, filling in regions using GIMP, then reimporting them into Inkscape, and overlaying the vector outlines.
For meeple, she laboriously cut them out by hand from Sculpey clay. A cookie cutter would have been ideal but it took her less time to cut the figures than for me to bend copper flashing into the shape of a person or to devise a way to extrude the figures.
Also, in case that URL goes down, here is a link to the tile generator on GitHub pages:
https://tomkinsc.github.io/carcassonne-shading/
Cool use of javascript.
But yeah, if that's true it's a real buzzkill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=292&v=0R3mMUsHFvU
I said so in a comment half an hour ago, but it immediately got downvoted to oblivion. Meanwhile the comment seems to slowly recover.
Nowhere on their website they say so. I would be really pissed if I bought a printer for thousands of dollars, unpack it and then realize I cannot use it. Letting it use my internet connection and being dependant on the services of a company to use it would not be an option for me.
Also, there's a lot of overlap between people who have the extra space/building/shop to properly run equipment like this and people that have spotty rural Internet.
[0] http://glowforge.com/gpl-licensed-open-source-firmware-for-g...
Edit: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10273316 and marked it off-topic.
It's true that there are other unsubstantive comments in the thread, and many more elsewhere on HN, but we can't reply to them all. Our intention is absolutely not to pick on anyone personally, but to provide signals to the community about the level of discourse we're all going for here.
http://glowforge.com/our-new-advisor-jennifer-lawton/
If you have been following the whole Makerbot Industries (and then Stratasys) debacle, seeing the name of Jennifer Lawton might give you pause.
I think I'm going to sit this one out.
For those of us who haven't been, can you give a TL;DR version of why this is significant?
For the slightly longer version the class action lawsuit conatins a lot more detail: http://www.adafruit.com/pdfs/makerbot/classaction.pdf
You can also check out Glassdoor reviews: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Makerbot-Reviews-E480203.ht...
I can confirm that the Makerbot 5gen is a defective product. We have one at the office gathering dust after trying to make it work for a few months. It is beyond hope.
Yikes. Clogged extruders and many software problems:
http://nicklievendag.com/makerbot-replicator-5th-generation-...
I do wonder why the pre-order price is SO much cheaper than the actual price. At pre-order it's a still. At regular price it's kinda a bit meh.
Your partner should bring her design to a local workshop to cut, unless she wants to open the local workshop.
Also, the boardgame industry can prototype cards much better with this - printing out Catan-like hex-tiles and the like.