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Laser cutters are probably where it is at. They are lower maintenance, faster and can make sturdier objects. But not like this: "A camera inside the laser cu
by keenerd 12y ago
Laser cutters are probably where it is at. They are lower maintenance, faster and can make sturdier objects. But not like this: "A camera inside the laser cutting chamber and image processing in the cloud will take the place of a part called a motion planner." Great, now we have a printer that needs a high speed internet connection to proprietary servers just to operate, after uploading everything you print to the cloud. As if the shenanigans that the inkjet people pull are not bad enough, think of how anti-consumer and anti-maker this is going to be.
- danshapiro 12y agoI hear you. As we set out to design the Glowforge, we did not make the decision lightly to engineer it as a network-native device. It makes the experience better in many ways - lower cost, more powerful, and easier to use - but the flip side is that if you're not connected, you can't use it. That's a real drawback. That said, we prefer our Dropcams to our closed circuit TVs and our Fitbits to our pedometers. We realize that some people may not like the tradeoffs we made, but we hope some folks are as excited about it as we are.
- keenerd 12y agoEthically if it is truly nothing more than a cost saving measure, you'll do the $0 option and release a completely unsupported server disk image for people to self-host on their LAN. Think of how much money you can save on CPU and network ingress. On a purely technical side, I have a strong suspicion that "cost saving" is a smokescreen. A camera would be useful for quality assurance, A/B testing new routing equations and at most calibrating the origin point of the bed. But maybe I am a little jaded from SimCity 5.