Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware
glowforge.com
glowforge.com
The device will still operate only as long as Glowforge's servers stay up. If there are internet outages, or the company goes out of business, the device will no longer function as a laser cutter.
The firmware is a very small piece of the puzzle. The cloud service is being portrayed as doing all of the heavy lifting. That's image processing, CAM, toolpath creation, and motion optimization/lookahead. Once the motion is optimized so that the motion system will move as fast as possible within its acceleration limits, the result is a list of explicit instructions for the motion system and laser. Accelerate at rate A for T seconds. After X steps, pulse the laser at a power level of P.
Thus, the firmware simply processes these instructions, and actuates the motors and lasers. That's not to say the firmware is trivial. But in comparison to the overall codebase, it is a very small chunk of the complete CNC system.
I'm not arguing that Glowforge is under any obligation to open source anything. But this is a fairly small concession that does not address the main concern that most people have voiced, the inability to run the complete system on your local machine.
Probably right. What's needed is source code escrow for the cloud service, so if Glowforge tanks, the code goes open source.
Truly Open Source doesn't mean runs without any other components, it just means you can replace any of the components yourself.
What kind of organization would provide this service? And who pays for the infrastructure?
If I buy hardware and software, and can execute the software on my own systems, I can run that combination for as long as I like exactly like on day 1, and as the product was advertised.
If I buy hardware and only borrow the software, I have a big problem the moment the access to the software goes away. The open source release of the firmware is a good step to ensure I might get out of the story with more than a paperweight, but won't let me keep using the product I once bought and wanted to use.
You can continue to use proprietary hardware that is no longer supported by the manufacturer, as long as it is self contained. I think that SaaS is an unfortunate misstep, and making hardware depend on SaaS is even worse.
Our competitors in the 3D printing space did the exact same thing, they open sourced their "client". But all of the real processing is on the server, so it's really inconsequential. In my opinion it's just a way to market your product as "open source" even though 90% of it is proprietary.
The hackers/makers that they target with this branding should see through it pretty easily. I'm not sure if there is a segment of users who would be fooled by it.
No it does not. And among the people who care, they're just digging the hole deeper. It felt evasive to ignore the question about the cloud over and over while conspicuously answering other questions, and responding with a disingenuous "thank you" while throwing out a half-measure (that really doesn't help that much) makes it worse.
There is one response to this that will work: Oh we get it. It was our business model but its feeling like more rotten DRM to our customers. We have to change it.
Might I suggest: "We have this cloud service that we think adds tremendous value to the product and is offered for this amazing low price, but if not, here is exactly how to use the product as a standalone ordinary laser machine if you so choose."
Its not too late.
I'm sure this will also help them attract talent. Amidst this patents/walled gardens/copyrights debate, someone saying: "If you buy it, it’s yours – you should be able to do what you want with it." is someone you might want to work with. Privacy advocates feeling scared to be tracked using their laser cutter will also welcome the news favorably.
They open source the firmware because the firmware is a dumb client; all the logic that controls the laser (aka makes it not set your house on fire) is hidden in the cloud.
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.
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.
Can we get some answers for other concerns too? Like this one; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10276426
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.
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.
I'm really really tempted to buy one now.
PS: no pentalobe screws either.
Then again, the type of fasteners is not at all an obstacle for someone wanting to hack around on a machine like this. The software is the far more important part.
I'd rather support a company that didn't have this silly restriction - I'm not willing to throw a few grand down the toilet if somebody else's servers stop working.
edit: ok it's only the firmware that's being open sourced. Still I think my original comment applies. Maybe a competitor improves code from the firmware and puts it behind the cloud.
But my original thought was that maybe there's some useful logic in the firmware that's extracted to cloud. And on that point, it's pretty speculative.
It's a daunting thing, at first, to open up a proprietary security blanket.
May the market treat you well!