This is a great step in the right direction, but I wonder how difficult it may be to actually use considering they've removed so much of normal laser hardware. Anyone know how feasible it will be to control it?
How defensible is Glowforge’s laser cutting tech? Shapiro says the key innovation the team has come up with is moving a large number of functions out of the hardware itself and into the cloud. “We have ripped out huge amounts of hardware from the machine — from a typical laser design, and replaced those with software that we run in cloud servers instead of running locally,” he explains.
One example is the motion controller board used on many traditional laser cutters to translate whatever line the person wants cutting or engraving into a series of electrical pulses that choreograph the motor. Instead of using that type of component, which Shapiro says starts at $400, or even using a cheaper alternative controller like an Arduino, the Glowforge uses cloud software to do the grunt work. “We simply send down the ones and zeros for the motor to the machine over the internet which reduces the cost by a factor of 100,” he notes.
“The thing that’s relatively easy to clone is the hardware, although we have some interesting innovations and patents there, but the place where we think we can really add a great deal of value is in the software,” he adds.
Glowforge has enough horsepower to work offline if someone built the custom firmware, albeit without the features that differentiate it from a traditional CNC laser cutter/engraver. We started out the design with a minimal microcontroller but decided to bump up the capabilities of the onboard processor along the way.
Why "the cloud"? Certainly there's more than enough horsepower on my local PC and enough bandwidth in my USB cable to direct it, or even better, allow my PC to queue up the movement instructions and just hold them in a memory buffer in the cutter. Then I can use it without my internet connection being up.
I think that TechCrunch article makes it quite clear: they're using the cloud to make it harder for people to see what their product is actually doing and clone it. Basically, trying to get their laser cutter to work without access to their cloud service should be as hard as building a new one from scratch, by design, since they claim to have put all the hard parts of their system in the cloud.
2. If you have a laptop, and a 13 hour print, you shouldn't need to have it tethered during the whole print. Many repraps don't even have SD card readers.
3. Why are we still tethering and transferring files physically? This is 2015.
4. Processing toolpaths on your PC means that your results will vary based on which PC you are using. And the majority of users won't get the performance that you could get by just sharing cloud server resources.
5. The PC requirement also severely limits your ability to access data about your machine, and integrations into other services.
Now that my 3D printer is driven from the cloud, I don't need to worry about slicer updates, driver updates, or hardware performance. My machine operates as a service that I can access and control from anywhere.
In summary, using the cloud for toolpath generation untethers us from the machine, removes the manual labour, enables mobile usage, and allows these machines to integrate into other services.
I disagree with these points on some general levels, even though for this particular product at this particular price point I can see the raionale somewhat:
1) Consumers might be moving away from desktops, but I don't know that creators are so much yet. However I think that's a moot point - desktop, laptop, tablet, whatever. It's not about form factor it's about computing power and it wouldn't surprise me if the latest iPad Pro or even top-end smartphone had the computing power to do these calculations locally.
2) My 3D Printing Systems UP Mini does the heavy lifting on my local PC and then sends that data off to the printer where the printer stores it in memory. Once the print job is sent off and the printer starts going, there's no longer any need for the PC - you can shut the PC down and leave the printer going.
3) Easily solved with a local Wi-Fi connection. Printers (the paper kind) have had this problem solved for ages now. There was no complicated setup for my cheap printer with Wi-Fi; my desktop just found it.
4) Job queue time may vary sure, but once it's sent to the printer it shouldn't matter.
5) This isn't all-or-nothing. What's stopping this from being an optional feature?
"Now that my 3D printer is driven from the cloud...." That doesn't preclude core functionality being available locally. It does mean that if this start-up doesn't succeed, you'll be left with an expensive paperweight until someone writes open backend firmware.
I really love the idea of this product and I can see how cloud connection can be a real enabler (look at what it's done for voice recognition on low-power devices, for example). I'm just really sceptical of this type of cloud-connected device as a general good thing for consumers - there are both good and bad sides to this. We really do need to be asking these questions and getting proper answers and assurances that as consumers we're getting something that's of benefit to us and that we won't be abandoned.
These points should be in a top level comment. There are some very good reasons for running a printer from a cloud based service. It solves more problems that it causes.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/20/glowforge-series-a/
How defensible is Glowforge’s laser cutting tech? Shapiro says the key innovation the team has come up with is moving a large number of functions out of the hardware itself and into the cloud. “We have ripped out huge amounts of hardware from the machine — from a typical laser design, and replaced those with software that we run in cloud servers instead of running locally,” he explains.
One example is the motion controller board used on many traditional laser cutters to translate whatever line the person wants cutting or engraving into a series of electrical pulses that choreograph the motor. Instead of using that type of component, which Shapiro says starts at $400, or even using a cheaper alternative controller like an Arduino, the Glowforge uses cloud software to do the grunt work. “We simply send down the ones and zeros for the motor to the machine over the internet which reduces the cost by a factor of 100,” he notes.
“The thing that’s relatively easy to clone is the hardware, although we have some interesting innovations and patents there, but the place where we think we can really add a great deal of value is in the software,” he adds.