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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

Mental note: Never, ever buy anything that team is involved with.

I go way back with various machines. Cutting, bending, printing, whatever.

If it won't take gcode, or some other open data to operate with, whatever it is, no matter how good it is, the answer is no.

Always no.

It has to take, gcode, svg, dxf, real postscript, hpgl, png, something. And it has to do that offline, period.

There are great machines made in the 80's still making money, and I saw one just yesterday. Wonderful to see.

Yes, I realize these are consumer grade machines, but what will also happen is these things will get abandoned.

Maybe someone will reverse engineer them and they become useful over the longer term.

I hope someone does.

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We're trying to make it so existing Cricut devices can be unchained from their vaporous bullshit (aka: cloud).

https://discord.gg/KsReJ3cN Come help!

I would love to. Unfortunately, I am maxxed out.

The fuck you would be worth it! Good luck!

Do you have any recommendations for machines that someone could reasonably fit in their home to replace a cricut?

The reasonably-priced response to this is the CAMEO from Silhouette.

US Cutter MH series cutter would probably fit the bill. they range from small to quite large

I have extensive experience with a nice Roland at a local Fabian. And I recently bought an MH series for home projects with the kids. I’m pleasantly surprised how good the MH is for the money! Assuming $20/birthday present, the machine will easily pay for itself in a year of gift making. Plus I get the kids to help make their friends gifts unique rather than buying something from a store. That is priceless to me!

Will it register and cut out a print (contour cut)? I love the cameo silhouette for that, but dont see it mentioned for the MH.

Mine does not. I think you would need to step up a level from the MH series with US Cutter. I seem to recollect that was about $100-$150 more for that capability. But check their website.

Though depending upon your tolerance requirements, you could manually align your cuts to a registration mark assuming your material was inserted squarely.

What is a Fabian?

Perhaps a typing / autocorrect error for Fablab: https://www.fablabs.io/

In other words, a type of maker space / hackspace.

Yup. Good catch!

Sorry. Should have been fab lab

Used to run one and it was quite capable.

Happy user of silhouette.

https://glowforge.com/our-products

https://flux3dp.com/beamo/

Glowforge Pro - $5,995

Glowforge Basic - $2,995

Beamo Desktop (30W) - $2,000

All-in-one laser cutter on your desk. Otherwise modifying a 3D printer (e.g. Ender 3/5) with CNC/Laser attachments work as well if your budget is much lower. :)

Please note that Glowforge ALSO requires the obnoxious cloud to actually cut. And being forced to rely on "cloud" is how Cricut is able to bait-n-switch users and effectively demand more money for purchased hardware.

There is absolutely 0 reason why a CNC laser cutter needs commodity internet at all. And I'd argue that an internet controlled fire-causing laser is a Bad Idea.

Because Glowforge requires their server farms online, Glowforge could pull a Cricut at any moment's notice.

Beamo is local only through USB, I may or may not have been tempted to buy it just for that.

Glowforge is cloud-based too though, and doesn't accept gcode (ddingus's criterion from another comment on this post [1]). What evidence is there that Glowforge isn't just at an earlier phase of the same pattern?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26479791

One evidence is that glowforge open sourced their stuff, not saying it would be easy, but it does make it possible to avoid their cloud thing https://github.com/Glowforge .

If the cutting op protocol is exposed, that is really good. We can make a library.

Nice to know.

That all looks like the bare minimum they're legally required to open source due to using GPLed code (the Linux kernel, uboot, etc).

Well crap.

I need to edit while I can.

Exactly.

There is no evidence.

Anytime there is lock in on machines, there will eventually be rent seeking.

I have zero trust on this.

Those are not even close. A Cricut starts at $200.

The rental begins at $200, right?

Cricut is a small CNC exacto knife, they cost ~$200

People use Cricut/CAMEO to cut vinyl stickers for the most part. Can't cut vinyl with lasers, you get chloride.

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