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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Probably has to do with how it analyzes the object it's cutting on, and determines what's suitable from there.

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.

That's why I like to read comments before clicking. Thanks for saving my bandwidth. What a shame.

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. :(

Relik, depending on your needs, you may also want to build one yourself. We built ourselves a lasersaur.

And if they go out of business, you have an expensive brick?

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.

Do you have any details about this? I can't seem to find that on their site.

But yeah, if that's true it's a real buzzkill.

They say so here at 13:40

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.

Yep, that's where I heard it. I doubt many people listened that far into the video which is why I came back and posted it.

He has just made a commitment to release the firmware as GPL[0] when the device launches. It is user flashable.

[0] http://glowforge.com/gpl-licensed-open-source-firmware-for-g...

Due to the excellent suggestions here, in large part. Thanks for the feedback, both positive and critical.

I like this guy. Can we get him to make other things?

This is completely ridiculous. What possible justification could they have for this?

Maybe like DRM?

Ah. Nevermind, moving right along....

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