Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

http://glowforge.com/gpl-licensed-open-source-firmware-for-glowforge/

by danshapiro • 11 years ago

279 53 11 years ago

kposehn• 11 years ago

Good move in response to a rather vociferous desire.

trishume• 11 years ago

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.

tajen• 11 years ago

That would be a great move for VolksWagen too ;)

monochromatic• 11 years ago

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

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

    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!

danshapiro2• 11 years ago

I cut (engraved?) my teeth on the laser at Metrix - love to get them one at some point soon, but it'll be after preorder campaign is over I'm afraid. We'll be at the Geekwire event next week if you'd like to check it out, though. (and are at Maker Faire in NYC this weekend for those eastwardly inclined)

voltagex_• 11 years ago

Any way-out future plans to offer deals to hackerspaces? makehackvoid.com in Canberra, Australia could probably make great use of one of these. (As could many others, just wanted to get a shoutout in)

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

Good to know, thanks!

userbinator• 11 years ago

To be fair, other types of screw drives in the same socket-like family, e.g. Torx or hex, are a good choice since they are generally more resistant to stripping.

Then again, the type of fasteners is not at all an obstacle for someone wanting to hack around on a machine like this. The software is the far more important part.

vvanders• 11 years ago

Class act.

ISL• 11 years ago

Awesome! Thank you.

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

May the market treat you well!

uniclaude2• 11 years ago

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.

gohrt2• 11 years ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10276430

They open source the firmware because the firmware is a dumb client; all the logic that controls the laser (aka makes it not set your house on fire) is hidden in the cloud.

uniclaude2• 11 years ago

Thanks for presenting a balanced opinion. I still find their position quite fair (looks like there lies their real business model) even though I wish they'd be more clear about it. Everything makes more sense now.

IshKebab• 11 years ago

But that logic is hardly complicated. The firmware is the bit that would be really annoying to reverse engineer. The rest anyone can write fairly easily.

logn3• 11 years ago

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.

gohrt2• 11 years ago

That's... Glowforge's business model. The high-level control logic software is in the cloud.

logn3• 11 years ago

That shouldn't make it Affero GPL incompatible as long as they make the code available. Regardless, if they own the copyright, they don't need to follow Affero GPL despite licensing it that way; it only applies to those who don't have copyright.

edit: ok it's only the firmware that's being open sourced. Still I think my original comment applies. Maybe a competitor improves code from the firmware and puts it behind the cloud.

scrollaway• 11 years ago

Affero GPL would be suitable if they were releasing the serverside code, not the dumb client code. Here, it would make no difference.

tmuir2• 11 years ago

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.

Animats• 11 years ago

"The firmware is a very small piece of the puzzle."

Probably right. What's needed is source code escrow for the cloud service, so if Glowforge tanks, the code goes open source.

jakobegger2• 11 years ago

This won't help you if your internet connection is down.

fudged713• 11 years ago

That's a good idea in theory, but what about maintenance and related devops? It's not enough to assume the code would be reliable on its own.

What kind of organization would provide this service? And who pays for the infrastructure?

sophacles2• 11 years ago

These folks didn't invent the CNC ecosystem. They didn't even invent the realatively inexpensive laser cutter. If the firmware is GPL, I'm fairly certain plenty of existing toolkits will get drivers for the it in short order.

jo909• 11 years ago

But then you still have a totally different product.

If I buy hardware and software, and can execute the software on my own systems, I can run that combination for as long as I like exactly like on day 1, and as the product was advertised.

If I buy hardware and only borrow the software, I have a big problem the moment the access to the software goes away. The open source release of the firmware is a good step to ensure I might get out of the story with more than a paperweight, but won't let me keep using the product I once bought and wanted to use.

raisedbyninjas• 11 years ago

CAD/CAM software is not cheap either. When their cloud suite goes dark, you'll have to cobble together your own toolchain.

jakobegger2• 11 years ago

Completely agree. But devices should work without a connection to a cloud, even if that cloud was open source. In this case, I see no reason for performing logic in the cloud, except that it makes DRM easier: You can't copy code you don't have.

You can continue to use proprietary hardware that is no longer supported by the manufacturer, as long as it is self contained. I think that SaaS is an unfortunate misstep, and making hardware depend on SaaS is even worse.

ambrop7• 11 years ago

Given the firmware source, it generally isn't too hard to port an existing open-source motion control software (which there are plenty of) to run on this machine. Electronics schematics would help but the firmware source is enough.

fudged713• 11 years ago

Yes!

Our competitors in the 3D printing space did the exact same thing, they open sourced their "client". But all of the real processing is on the server, so it's really inconsequential. In my opinion it's just a way to market your product as "open source" even though 90% of it is proprietary.

The hackers/makers that they target with this branding should see through it pretty easily. I'm not sure if there is a segment of users who would be fooled by it.

noonespecial• 11 years ago

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

No it does not. And among the people who care, they're just digging the hole deeper. It felt evasive to ignore the question about the cloud over and over while conspicuously answering other questions, and responding with a disingenuous "thank you" while throwing out a half-measure (that really doesn't help that much) makes it worse.

There is one response to this that will work: Oh we get it. It was our business model but its feeling like more rotten DRM to our customers. We have to change it.

Might I suggest: "We have this cloud service that we think adds tremendous value to the product and is offered for this amazing low price, but if not, here is exactly how to use the product as a standalone ordinary laser machine if you so choose."

Its not too late.

mratzloff• 11 years ago

It would be so much more friendly to have a functional UI hosted locally on the device and to serve updates and optionally populate additional functionality from the web. If your web offering is good enough, most people would have no problem with this setup; it satisfies everyone's needs. If they don't want it to connect out, they just block external connections from this device.

llamataboot• 11 years ago

way more expensive to put all that processing power inside each cutter though

dahdum• 11 years ago

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.

danshapiro2• 11 years ago

(Glowforge CEO/cofounder here)

Glowforge has enough horsepower to work offline if someone built the custom firmware, albeit without the features that differentiate it from a traditional CNC laser cutter/engraver. We started out the design with a minimal microcontroller but decided to bump up the capabilities of the onboard processor along the way.

burnte2• 11 years ago

Why "the cloud"? Certainly there's more than enough horsepower on my local PC and enough bandwidth in my USB cable to direct it, or even better, allow my PC to queue up the movement instructions and just hold them in a memory buffer in the cutter. Then I can use it without my internet connection being up.

Timucin• 11 years ago

Hi Dan,

Can we get some answers for other concerns too? Like this one; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10276426

radicalbyte• 11 years ago

3d printers (i.e. RepRap) do the same only the "work" is done by the user's PC.

fudged713• 11 years ago

1. Consumers are moving away from desktop PCs

2. If you have a laptop, and a 13 hour print, you shouldn't need to have it tethered during the whole print. Many repraps don't even have SD card readers.

3. Why are we still tethering and transferring files physically? This is 2015.

4. Processing toolpaths on your PC means that your results will vary based on which PC you are using. And the majority of users won't get the performance that you could get by just sharing cloud server resources.

5. The PC requirement also severely limits your ability to access data about your machine, and integrations into other services.

Now that my 3D printer is driven from the cloud, I don't need to worry about slicer updates, driver updates, or hardware performance. My machine operates as a service that I can access and control from anywhere.

In summary, using the cloud for toolpath generation untethers us from the machine, removes the manual labour, enables mobile usage, and allows these machines to integrate into other services.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

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 ..

binoyxj• 11 years ago

Can watch the latest video tour here https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/videos/101536135477696...

markvdb• 11 years ago

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

topazas• 11 years ago

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

analognoise• 11 years ago

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.

Thanks HN: Glowforge will open-source its firmware

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