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Thread: Glowforge release

  1. #1351
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    The GF cloud computer is sending data, not control signals. This data could take several forms. Sending a block for each motion of each stepper would be incredibly inefficient but GF may be doing it that way. What I take issue with is the claim that there is no control board. That statement is absurd. There must be some electronics to turn a raw digital data stream into stepper motor pulses and that electronics must be local to the machine. In fact, I saw a tear down of a Glowforge machine on the internet the other day and the control board was clearly visible.

    It is unfortunate that Glowforge designed a machine with so little intelligence that it is worth nothing without a reliable and high speed internet connection and the existence and support of a small shaky company. The company advertises this gross deficiency as if it were an advantage.

  2. #1352
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    Quote Originally Posted by Art Mann View Post
    The GF cloud computer is sending data, not control signals.
    I think you are right, but do you have a source for that information or are you just stating it as fact because that is the way it should be?
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  3. #1353
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    I am stating it as a fact because that is what it is. It is completely impossible to send anything other than data over any internet connection anywhere. Information is transferred in precisely formatted blocks of 1's and 0's. To see it any other way is the same as claiming you can shake hands over the telephone. These blocks of information must be encoded before they are sent and decoded when they are received. There must be some level of intelligence on both ends to do that job. In the case of Glowforge, they are bragging on just how dumb their controls are.

  4. #1354
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    Ok..... so yes we all know its 1 and 0 data.... but I guess I am not following. Someone has claimed its direct control of the stepper motors using the standard we all know as direction and pulse from an onboard controller of some kind. I am saying without a buffer or file storage of some sort that would not work. It would lose steps all over the place. Regardless its a flawed design.
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  5. #1355
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    Quote Originally Posted by Art Mann View Post
    It is unfortunate that Glowforge designed a machine with so little intelligence that it is worth nothing without a reliable and high speed internet connection and the existence and support of a small shaky company. The company advertises this gross deficiency as if it were an advantage.
    The odd bit is that there is a huge amount of compute capacity within the GF hardware: an ARM processor, 4GB of flash memory, and 512MB of RAM, certainly more than enough to convert G-code/HPGL/WMF/whatever into stepper direction/pulse and laser modulation signals.

    Data point: my ULS gets by with a couple of FPGAs, a few tens of MB of local driver software in the host computer, and a USB cable to connect the two. The GF has more power than the 900MHz PIII I was using to drive the ULS when it was new in 2005.
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    "Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
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  6. #1356
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    Quote Originally Posted by Art Mann View Post
    I am stating it as a fact because that is what it is. It is completely impossible to send anything other than data over any internet connection anywhere. Information is transferred in precisely formatted blocks of 1's and 0's. To see it any other way is the same as claiming you can shake hands over the telephone. These blocks of information must be encoded before they are sent and decoded when they are received. There must be some level of intelligence on both ends to do that job. In the case of Glowforge, they are bragging on just how dumb their controls are.
    I am sure you know that step and direction signals are just ones and zeroes. Yes, everything sent over the internet must be packaged into packets then unpacked when received. Those packets could contain step and direction signals or they could contain a description of the artwork - something more like gcode. The latter is most likely.

    I don't think they are sending the step and direction signals over the internet but it is possible. Remember that step/dir signals still have to go through a driver before they are of any use to a stepper motor - and before they get to the driver they must be buffered and fed to the driver at a precise rate, synchronized with both axis and the laser firing signal.
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  7. #1357
    I posted this a while back -

    GF Forum Member: "CAM & Motion Planning is done in the cloud. And the GF Controller receives a multi-channel waveform to control all the things? So- There is nothing on board that does the traditional step/dir generation onboard? (i.e. Mesa or PRU)... Just feeding in the actual pulse....that has been post processed remotely?"

    Dan: "Exactly. Funny Glowforge genesis story: I was going back and forth with Mark, our CTO, between closed-loop (servos, which I was advocating) and open-loop (steppers). He made a better case for steppers. Finally I said, "Well [heck], if you want to go open loop, you don't even need local control at all. Just put the [darn] motion controller in the server." I didn't actually realize what I'd suggested until Mark stared at me like I was from Mars for a while and it dawned on both of us just how powerful that could be."

  8. #1358
    The interesting thing is, ping times have gotten so fast, it's actually possible to send a packet almost half-way around the world and get a response more quickly than a machine can change the colour of a pixel on a graphics card and the system can get that change to register on a display (though arguably that example is intended as a criticism of LCD latency).

    The things I'd be curious about for such an approach (motion planner in the cloud) would be:

    - how much bandwidth does it go through? Assuming 4 hrs. of operation per day --- what's the minimum data capacity one would need to budget for it
    - how does the system deal with dropped packets?

  9. #1359
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    Anyone who claims to be transmitting actual control signals over the internet is amazingly ignorant. The only thing the internet can transmit or receive is digital data. The data may be reconstructed on the local machine so as to generate control signals but that is absolutely not the same thing as "a multi-channel waveform" sending control signals directly over the internet. It is like saying that if the power fails in someone's house, they can just hook up to the internet and have the power company send them power that way. The verbiage in the the quote above is about as sensible as claiming that a laser cutter is a 3-D machine. I believe the quote from "Dan" is constructed so as to confuse people who don't understand how things really work.

  10. #1360
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    Oh Hum.... another discussion of things we already know. Yes Art its just digital data so its useless. But at the sending end it starts as stepper and direction signals, and at the receiving end its converted back into those same signals. That's the wonder of the internet.

    Back when I got my Radio Shark TRS-80 and we hams built from scratch circuits from QST magazine I transmitted RTTY and CW over local 2 meter FM ham bands. Yes you could hear the data stream and like magic the circuits changed those into text on the computer screen. Heck that was even before the internet. How could that be?
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  11. #1361
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    Quote Originally Posted by Art Mann View Post
    Anyone who claims to be transmitting actual control signals over the internet is amazingly ignorant. The only thing the internet can transmit or receive is digital data. The data may be reconstructed on the local machine so as to generate control signals but that is absolutely not the same thing as "a multi-channel waveform" sending control signals directly over the internet. It is like saying that if the power fails in someone's house, they can just hook up to the internet and have the power company send them power that way. The verbiage in the the quote above is about as sensible as claiming that a laser cutter is a 3-D machine. I believe the quote from "Dan" is constructed so as to confuse people who don't understand how things really work.
    Also Dan claims that if the company goes belly up that they would provide a program to run the laser. If that was the case why not just do it now and have less problems then they are having connecting and rendering.

  12. #1362
    Quote Originally Posted by Jerome Stanek View Post
    ...Dan claims ....
    Seems to be his primary role in the company...
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  13. Quote Originally Posted by Jerome Stanek View Post
    Also Dan claims that if the company goes belly up that they would provide a program to run the laser. If that was the case why not just do it now and have less problems then they are having connecting and rendering.
    This is what Dan claimed in 2015:

    https://community.glowforge.com/t/we...r-glowforge/92

    Since they are so close to shipping most of the domestic pre-release orders, one might think that the firmware would be available to owners now, but there's no sign of it and, so far as I know, GF has not answered any of the owner's questions about when it might be released. As always, whatever GF says is true until exactly the moment it isn't.

  14. #1364
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dan Shapiro
    "Well [heck], if you want to go open loop, you don't even need local control at all. Just put the [darn] motion controller in the server." I didn't actually realize what I'd suggested until Mark stared at me like I was from Mars for a while and it dawned on both of us just how powerful that could be."
    This makes no sense. So Mark and Dan are very high level geniuses and have discovered a novel way to extract some "power" from open loop stepper control over the internet, that does not require local control? Highly unlikely. More likely is that they are describing something else in terms that they think their intended audience will understand to be something brilliant and desirable.
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  15. #1365
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mike Henry3424 View Post
    This is what Dan claimed in 2015:

    https://community.glowforge.com/t/we...r-glowforge/92

    Since they are so close to shipping most of the domestic pre-release orders, one might think that the firmware would be available to owners now, but there's no sign of it and, so far as I know, GF has not answered any of the owner's questions about when it might be released. As always, whatever GF says is true until exactly the moment it isn't.
    What a lot of the people that already received their units is why it doesn't have a lan connection. You are forced to use wifi to run it even if they release a firmware that can use your own computer to control it.

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