Glowforge is a CNC Laser Cutter, not a 3D Printer (Video)

Video Glowforge is a CNC Laser Cutter, not a 3D Printer (Video) 45

Posted by Roblimo on Thursday May 28, 2015 @05:10PM from the some-machines-add-material-while-others-cut-it dept.

Video no longer available.

Co-Founder and CEO Dan Shapiro says, right at the beginning of the interview, that the Glowforge machine is a CNC laser cutter and engraver, not a 3-D Printer. He says they've "simplified the heck" out of the hardware and software, and are making an easy-to-use, non-costly ($2500 has been bandied about as the unit's likely price) device that can fit on a kitchen table -- or, more likely, a workbench at a maker facility. Although Dan did very well on Kickstarter (and afterwards) with his previous venture, Robot Turtles, this time he seems to have raised his first $9 million in the venture capital market, with participation from several MakerBot executives.

Glowforge is not the only CNC laser cutter/etcher device out there (or about to be). In Australia, Darkly Labs appears to have raised $569,397 (AUD) on Kickstarter to bring their LazerBlade to life, and already makes a small laser device called the Emblaser. There are others, too, including Boxzy, which did the Kickstarter thing and will now sell you a device that "rapidly transforms into 3 kinds of machines: CNC Mill, 3D Printer & Laser Engraver while enhancing precision & power with ballscrews." All this, and their top-of-the-line "does everything" machine sells for a mere $3500. Obviously, devices to give makers and prototypers the ability to make ever more complex and accurate shapes are coming to market like crazy. We'll continue to keep an eye on all this activity, including a second video interview with Glowforge's Dan Shapiro tomorrow.

Dan Shapiro : We’re making – what we refer to as a 3D laser printer, it’s actually a CNC laser cutter engraver, but we’ve gone and taken a whole bunch of the pain and suffering out of the software simplified the heck out of the hardware and really focused on making it easy to make magnificent things that are like objects that you would want to own and use and play with like this – my bag on the table behind me, made on a Glowforge, and you can see it holds exactly all the stuff that I use, and it’s got pockets and it’s just the size of my laptop. And so we’re excited about putting this in people’s hands for less than $2,500, so the ability to go and use illustrate or Photoshop whatever you want, hit print and create a beautiful stuff, with Glowforges.

Slashdot: When you say that the bag was made on a Glowforge, could you explain what cuts are actually – what cuts did you make to do that? What sort of material can you go through? What are some of the specsthat matter in order to make an object like that?

Dan: So when we started thinking about lasers, we kind of look to flat surfaces and realize that most stuff is made out of sheet cuts, plywood, lumber, leather, paper, cloth, and that if you do a really elegant job of cutting the shapes and make it easy to apply fasteners, then you wind up with tens of thousands of things that are easy enough that we put in a piece of material, hit print, you take it out and assemble it.

So in this case (leather portfolio) we started out as $40 worth of English kip leather, vegetable tanned, super high quality, everything else, but it came on a giant roll and so you cut it just with the razor blade into big pieces and you put them in the Glowforge and then you hit print, it does a couple of things, one thing is it’s going to cut each of these pieces, so you can see there is like – there is little loops to hold this, there is the strap, it cuts each of these with precision down to a 1,000th of an inch. So you can think if it is a 1,000 DPI printer or you can think of it is 1 milresolution, but because it’s so precise and accurate and because we compensate for a whole bunch of uncertainty in the machine and hardware itself, you get this really tight fit and then the really unique thing is it makes the needle holes, so I don’t know if you can see it, but this is laced up by hand, and I say laced up because there’s no sewing machine, and the needle isn’t even sharp, it’s actually a dull needle called a saddle stitch needle, and it’s about two or three movies worth, it’s the work of a weekend, I did the first prototype and our shopsupervisor Lauren did this one to sit and go in and do the whole thing. So this is about an hour of laser time and about five or six hours of time lacing it up for a weekend project.

Slashdot: Now, what can you tell us about the kind of hardware it takes to actually cut like this, how powerful a laser are you using, what sort of – now I want to couch that in terms of I guess present tense -- because talking about a consumer product at this point?

Dan: Yeah, so we are going to be shipping these to customers at the end of this year, that’s our plan. And we’re working really hard right now with manufacturers to nail down our manufacturing plant, I’m not going to give you a final tube spec, because we’re still playing around with it, and because frankly the tube watch is one of those things that play with, and so some people will call a tube – the same tube we’ll call it 28 watts or 40 watts or 50 watts for exactly the same sort of thing.

The key thing is, it’s enough to penetrate through 1/4 inch material, so you can do 1/4 inch plywood, solid hardwoods, acrylic – you can probably – you get thicker than a 1/4 inch of acrylic, turns out acrylic is a perfect wave guide at the frequencies we’re using, sort of because with reflection you can cut through a much thicker piece of acrylic than you can with some other materials, so you can actually play around with itgoing up to 1/2 inch with a good degree of success.

So you’ll be able to get through really thick materials, and the other nice thing is that – because of our motion controller, the software that controls the interaction between the pulses going to the motor and the control going to the laser, is really precise, we’re able to do very thin materials without scorching or other problems. So things like paperso you can do a birthday invitation or a paper cut work really well on a Glowforge as well. So you kind of get this whole realm from like a lamp that sits on your desk or a leather bag that you carry around every day, I’ve been using this for like three, four months now and it just breaks in great and is wearing wonderfully all the way down to tissue paper and like paper snowflakesand you get that whole range of materials.

Slashdot: How much intelligence is built into the machine when it comes to dealing with materials, and how much of it is on the designer side, do you have to specify that this is tissue paper and this is the hide of a bull elephant?

Dan: It’s a great question. In fact, one of the real challenges with people who have used lasers is that the process of dialing in and like you do a test and you look and if it doesn't work, you do another test you look it doesn’t work and there’s all sorts of things. We’ve come with some really interesting techniques that we’re using to make that go away, and so that you can say, hey, this is the material and then we take it from there, and in some cases you don’t have to identify the material at all, I can’t quite go into the secret sauce there yet, but I can say is, so it is actually not intelligence on the machine, so it’s the design principle, we've tried to make the machine as simple as possible, it’s because Firmware updates stink and because we want to make the machine as affordable as possible.

So most of the heavy lifting happens in a cloud service that we operate, we’re actually using Google’s compute cloud right now, and so we’ve moved a whole bunch of stuff that normally is either firmware or custom hardware and moved it into the cloud service so that you don’t have to pay for that in the upfront hardware costs, and we just operate it on the back end.

Slashdot: One thing that worries me about any piece of hardware is whether I have to worry about the company that made it is still around.

Dan: Yeah.

Slashdot: If you put a lot of things in the cloud, let’s say, in five years the world has gone some different direction and some owns a Glowforge. What’s

Dan: Yeah.

Slashdot: What’s the level of either hassle or impossibility that they then face?

Dan: Yeah. We’ve been thinking about that too because I’d have exactly the same concerns like what happens to your Nest thermostat if Nest disappears.

Slashdot: I’m glad that Google has stepped in a little bit on that.

Dan: Yeah. That makes it less likely, because Google has never shut any products down, so we know that’s safe. The – that was a joke. The – we haven’t locked down what we are going to do about that, but there will be some sort of path where if you got a Glowforge and for whatever reason the back end service isn’t working that you will be able to make use of your hardware from a sort of principle standpoint, we want to be sure, you own what you own. And while we think there is a ton of value that we are going to be providing with that cloud service, we also want to make sure that we’re not locking down the machine and encumberingwith a tone of TRM and all that awful stuff. So we’re trying to find the right balance between those.

Slashdot: Now, avoiding TRM issomething that I think would please a great many people, another aspect though is the degree to which you are going to employ or tell me if you already do it behind the scenes and employ much software, in the world of laser cutters, in the world of 3D printers, there is a lot of them that are heavily Linux based or otherwise open source. Is that a concern? Or is that an aspect of Glowforge?

Dan: Oh, it’s fantastic. I mean we have been able to make immense use of the hardware to the open source community everything from having Inkscape as a free tool that we can use to go create designs, we have stayedwith Illustrator but it’s nice to have something where you don’t have to go sign up for the Adobe model in order to be able to create things all the way through to the web interface and the JavaScript packages that we are using and all that sort of stuff. And so we’re trying to be really deliberate about how we contribute back to the open source world. I feel real tension because on the one hand I want to do everything we can to be a great contributor there. On the other, I’ve seen companies that made promises that they couldn’t fulfill. And they went and said we’re going to do everything all the time and then when they wound up stepping back on something, people are really disappointed and I think reasonably so because they made promises that they couldn’t keep. So I am spending a long time talking to one of our investors and advisors Chris Dibona ofSlashdot fame who runs runs open source projects at Google, I’m talking to him about that, some of our investors Bre Pettisfrom MakerBot has spent a lot of time thinking about open source. And talking about what’s going right, and what’s going wrong, in the open source hardware community and with regards to open source software as it relates to powering hardware and I want to come out and say, look here is where Glowforge stands and we know we can stand by that. We are not quite there yet.

Slashdot: Yeah. MakerBot certainly hit a lot of flak for moving to a less open model.

Dan: Yeah. I think a lot of people got really upset, when they shifted what they were doing, and they felt like their promises weren’t kept. And I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.