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Tech companies, we wish you'd stop telling us about amazing-sounding gizmos that don't yet exist. We've spent well over a decade fueling our skepticism and bias by writing about, and occasionally mocking, all kinds of vaporware—and that attitude has only grown bolder during today's crowdfunding-riddled era.
For some networks, it may be necessary to whitelist the Glowforge in order to add it to your network. To do this, you’ll need the Glowforge printer’s MAC address. Your Glowforge has two different network interfaces, and you can follow these steps to find the MAC address that's needed for filtering: Reboot your Glowforge. Wait about 30 seconds. Glowforge App for iOS (Beta) We’re on our way to improving your phone and tablet experience with our new Glowforge App for iOS. Our iOS app gives you printing control right from your iPhone or iPad, and makes it easy to include a photo from your camera library right into your design. Download the app here. If you like MAC for it's simplicity of use and all in one ecosystem, then the gloforge might be for you. If you prefer linux, android, windows, the ability to make the machine do what you want when you want it, and don't mind getting a little more technical to achieve this, then don't buy a glowforge, get another laser instead. The Glowforge web app features dozens of material presets to work with, and can even scan QR codes found on materials bought from the company (or included in the sample project kits bundled with.
That made the promise of Glowforge all the harder to stomach. An industrial-grade laser-cutting machine for the home, priced at $1,995 (~£1,300) via a crowdfunded pre-sale? No way. We can barely peruse the Alibaba listings for laser-cutting machines without taking out multiple mortgages on our homes, and yet we're supposed to believe that we can laser-slice precise shapes into solid materials with a coming-soon device that costs less than a desktop-sized Makerbot Replicator 3D printer.
Days before the company's first wave of discounted pre-orders expires, we knocked on Glowforge's Seattle office doors, fully intending to squint, furrow, and cast doubt upon this sales pitch. Instead, we left the office seeing something that actually exists—and salivating at what the Glowforge can already do. We also, er, grabbed some gorgeous, Ars-themed hardwood drink coasters on our way out the door.
Laser Thursdays > Casual Fridays
'This is a beautiful piece of solid, walnut hardwood,' company CEO and co-founder Dan Shapiro says as he drops a single, 1/8'-thick board onto the Glowforge's main loading chamber—which accommodates objects up to 20'x12', and up to half an inch tall with the default tray installed. Then he walks to a nearby computer, where he loads a high-resolution version of the Ars Technica logo in Adobe Illustrator and pastes that into the Glowforge printing app.
The app automatically recognizes the logo's circular shape with an internal design and guesses that we want to cut a perfect circle while engraving the letters A, R, and S into its center. Then it asks us where we want the laser to cut, so we drag the logo onto an image of the walnut board that's captured by the Glowforge's internal, bird's-eye camera—which includes a wide-angle lens for general planning and a macro camera for precision lasering.
The Glowforge is not a 3D printer—meaning, it's not an additive device that builds objects from a material of your choice (and for consumer-level 3D printers, that tends to be plastic). Rather, it's a top-down, laser-powered sculptor, meaning it can cleanly slice through some materials (wood, acrylic, leather, rubber, and more) and neatly engrave more of them (glass, stone, ceramic, and more).
In bad news, Glowforge isn't going to take a full, 3D schematic and print it out ready-made for users. It's ultimately a 2D carving machine for relatively thin materials. Shapiro is fine with that—especially for homebrew and amateur builders who are looking for low-price ways to quickly build things with materials that are ultimately more robust than what 3D printers' spools of filament can pull off.
His team has had quite a bit of time to experiment and create robust, multi-part items—particularly during the company's weekly 'Laser Thursday' jams, which we think make Casual Friday look like crap. Everywhere we turn at Glowforge headquarters, we're either warned that 'you're gonna get a kick out of this,' or we start involuntarily kicking, as we look at tremendous item after tremendous item that was made within the confines of this lab.
A five-foot sphere of a corrugated cardboard lamp that has been cut to make it look like the earth (using NOAA bathymetric map data, of course); a leather-and-plywood mouse pad whose front face is covered with a crazy-intricate etching of a seaside town; a journal whose outer cover is made of solid wood, yet can bend like a paper journal thanks to a precise slicing of its ridge; an enclosed, wooden box; and a custom-made set of pieces for the board game Settlers of Catan, whose separate pieces for wood, brick, and other game materials have been cut out of different types of wood (and etched with, yet again, more mindblowingly intricate details).
You had us at bacon
Glowforge.app
Many of the coolest pieces we saw, including pen cases and elaborate, multi-part boxes, require either separate parts that snap together perfectly or hot glue guns. We weren't invited to print anything so complex ourselves; we figure that Shapiro has offered custom, fancy-looking coasters to other visitors before, since they're a pretty effective and quick way to sell both halves of the Glowforge equation. The boards we cut our coasters out of were covered in paper stickers, and those stickers had small burn marks on them which didn't carry over to the final products once removed. Shapiro reminds us that this isn't a burning process, but rather a vaporizing one in which a Class 1 laser running at 40 watts has its aim 'focused down to 0.008 of an inch'—and ultimately operating at 1,000 DPI.
Glowforge App Macbook
Both the coasters' round edges and interior curvy font cuts looked remarkably smooth at a finger's length; if we shoved our eyes right up to the finished product, we noticed a slightly stair-steppy look to the edges, but not much, and not consistently. Each of these took a pretty breezy five minutes to cut and engrave using the 'basic' model of Glowforge, by the way, and Shapiro believes the final, basic model will get that count down to three minutes.
The basic model can be boosted with an additional $500 air filter, meaning it won't need to be placed near a window to vent. The $3,995 'pro' Glowforge comes with the air filter, as well, and it jacks its maximum laser intensity to 45 watts (which does bring it up to a Class IV laser device, Shapiro notes). More importantly for ambitious builders, the pro will also include a 'passthrough' slot so that materials can be as long as users want, so long as they don't exceed 20 inches in width.
Glowforge App Mac Download
Shapiro, whose work resume includes major stints at Microsoft and an e-commerce company sold to Google (along with a college stint as a laser-show DJ of all things), is coming into the market in a way that he thinks is comparable to 3D printing's rise: 'The technology has been around for decades,' he says. 'Laser cutting just hasn't changed that much in 30 years.' To that point, he shows us a laser cutting machine that he purchased from a Chinese distributor a few years ago for $11,000, and while it has a larger cutting tray and a laser that can cut through more materials in a single pass, it's otherwise pretty similar in technology and execution—though it looks much uglier than Glowforge's smooth, desk-friendly design (and doesn't even have Glowforge's convenient multi-camera system, at that).
In addition to raising $9 million from VC firms, Glowforge is currently sitting on a whopping $15 million in pre-orders—and that number will surely grow until the discounted pre-order campaign concludes on Friday, October 23. With a larger confirmed volume of orders, Shapiro is confident that he'll build 'a better machine,' especially due to the custom-tube order he needs to place for the Glowforge's laser system.
If anything, Shapiro is a lot less confident in declaring a full list of materials that will be ideal for the Glowforge (though he's careful to note that materials such as vinyl and PVC won't cut it, both figuratively and literally). For starters: maybe food! He shows off precise laser-cut designs in sheets of nori seaweed, and he says the team has only begun testing ideal laser power and speed settings in figuring out how to best engrave chilled dipping chocolate. 'Imagine cooking bacon, and then engraving it!' Shapiro says, before adding that he has not tested bacon just yet (he eats Kosher, for one).
Glowforge kits will include pre-coded settings for typical materials, but buyers will be able to tweak power and speed settings—and even de-focus the laser, for the sake of melting and messing with certain types of material—when braving the wild, new frontier of laser-cutting whatever they damn well please.
Glowforge Macbook
The Glowforge team has tried other experimental stuff already, as well, including engravings on laptop lids, but because so much of Glowforge's potential comes from combining, assembling, and gluing pieces together, its ultimate potential in consumers' hands is difficult for Shapiro to fathom. Assuming his company meets its estimated shipping window of this December for the first Glowforge Pro models, he won't have to wait for long to see what's coming.
'We are going to have thousands of Glowforge owners who can make stuff like that,' Shapiro says, beaming at the pile of products his employees have already whipped up in the past few months. 'Honestly, I want to launch 1,000 Kickstarters. That's my goal.'
Glowforge Mac
Listing image by Sam Machkovech