Originally Posted by
Matt McCoy
Here's an excerpt:
"The glowforge does not have a motion controller onboard
How does it move then? It may not have motion planning, but it must have stepper control of some kind inside. I can't imagine it solely has an h-bridge being controlled over the internet. Stepper control etc must be local, otherwise network latency would cause total havoc...
Traditional motion controllers (GRBL, TinyG, Smoothie, Marlin, LinuxCNC (or MachineKit) & Mach3 all have the ability to output stepgen pulses required to move the steppers (specifically to tell the stepper drivers which direction and how long). The glowforge does not have this. The Glowforge 'cloud' create these and outputs a waveform in which the glowforge 'plays' locally."