from Hacker News

Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

by danshapiro on 9/25/15, 2:35 AM with 53 comments

  • by tmuir on 9/25/15, 4:52 AM

    This doesn't change the huge red flag that should give prospective customers pause.

    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.

  • by uniclaude on 9/25/15, 4:26 AM

    This is outstanding. I want to order one of those lasers now. Not only because I like the product, but also because I want to support companies going this way.

    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.

  • by dahdum on 9/25/15, 4:55 AM

    This is a great step in the right direction, but I wonder how difficult it may be to actually use considering they've removed so much of normal laser hardware. Anyone know how feasible it will be to control it?

    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.

  • by trishume on 9/25/15, 3:24 AM

    Oh man, this is the second best thing I could have hoped for after their earlier announcement today. The best thing would have been also open sourcing their cloud software, but I can see how they'd be reluctant to do that given that it is a competitive advantage over other laser cutter manufacturers.

    I'm really really tempted to buy one now.

  • by fit2rule on 9/25/15, 5:01 AM

    It great that they're open-sourcing the firmware, but its still not great that the product depends on "a cloud" in order to operate. I hope that is one of the very first things that gets addressed by contributors .. as someone who has orbited around some nice laser firmware projects in the past, I'll be interested in their source release and see if I can help in some way .. so, kudo's for the open source! Now lets get rid of that cloud ..

  • by aaronbrethorst on 9/25/15, 3:32 AM

        PS: no pentalobe screws either.
    This makes me happy :) Also, any chance you might demo one of these at Metrix on Capitol Hill sometime? I'd love to check it out in person without having to pay $2,000 first!

  • by binoyxj on 9/25/15, 5:38 AM

  • by monochromatic on 9/25/15, 3:30 AM

    I love to see this kind of immediate, positive, appropriate response to feedback.

  • by markvdb on 9/25/15, 9:25 AM

    Outstanding! I say this as the owner of a 100% FOSS & open hardware laser cutter...

  • by analognoise on 10/1/15, 4:17 PM

    I'm glad I found this, but saddened it relies on "the cloud".

    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.

  • by logn on 9/25/15, 4:31 AM

    Might want to consider Affero GPL. Without that, there's a possibility some competitor comes along, improves the software, puts it behind a cloud-only service, and never publishes the code.

  • by vvanders on 9/25/15, 3:35 AM

    Class act.

  • by ISL on 9/25/15, 4:25 AM

    Awesome! Thank you.

    It's a daunting thing, at first, to open up a proprietary security blanket.

    May the market treat you well!

  • by kposehn on 9/25/15, 3:23 AM

    Good move in response to a rather vociferous desire.

  • by topazas on 9/25/15, 10:13 AM

    I want this so badly... still no money :/