Also, the boardgame industry can prototype cards much better with this - printing out Catan-like hex-tiles and the like.

Also UK regulations says I need to be supervised to use a class 4 laser since I can point it to somewhere I shouldn't. I wonder if that's still valid for an enclosed product.

"Never look into the laser with your remaining eye"

Next, to get the laser to cut properly also takes some tweaking. It's almost impossible to get a repeatable cut, since there are so many different factors that you need to take into play: the location of the item you're cutting on the bed, the temperature of the laser, the thickness and quality of your material, the accuracy of the auto-focus, and the settings themselves. If we look at the location for example, there is a huge difference between the top left corner - where the laser mirror is - and the bottom right corner. On one side your material will catch fire, on the other, it will only cut half way through. The material is also an important factor - if the material is even 0.2mm thicker on the top compared to the bottom (especially true for acrylic), then the laser will go through on one side, and won't go through on the other. For wood, tiny differences in it's quality can have a significant impact on the cut and especially on any engraving you do. With wood and similar, easily smudged materials, you also have this sort of 'caramelisation' after you cut and engrave - the degree of this effect depends on whether you used the right power or not (for which you also have to take into account the location, temperature, material quality,...). If you try to clean it off by hand or with a dry tissue, you will smudge it further and it will be difficult to remove. Instead, you have to painstakingly clean every piece you cut with an alcohol soaked cloth, which will remove most of these smudges - however it won't remove any burn marks. As per the burn marks, you get a lot more of them when you use a honeycomb bed compared to one which has a number of thin pieces of metal that stretch across with a few cm interval. The glowforge laser has this honeycomb bed, so expect your wood, cardboard and paper cutouts to have some of these burn marks if you don't pay very close attention to the power/speed of the cut. With plastic, getting a cleaner cut is a bit easier, but the fumes are horrendous. Also, if you don't cut through the whole thickness of the plastic the first time, and do another pass, the edges which you cut will have these 'micro-cracks' that dont' look very professional. Similarly, if you cut with too much power, your plastic edges will just melt and look quite bad. However, an advantage with plastic cutting is that you can clean it without too much difficulty, if you use sufficient alcohol you can get most burn marks away.

Engraving looks really nice when done with a laser cutting, but it does take some time until you figure out the correct settings for each material. I particularly love engraved plastic and wood, the result (especially from genuine, extruded plexiglass) is beautiful and vey professional. A local public figure has had a picture of him holding a laser-engraved logo that I made him as his profile picture. Personally, I made some laser cut business cards, and they have absolutely blown away a lot of people - one person even told me that he stuck it to his wall for inspiration. I've also worked on laser cut tags/tokens that I give out as a promotional gift to people, and then they can use it as a fidelity card when they order things through my startup. I'm still working on perfecting these tags, but they required a lot of testing (over 30 different attempts just to get the QR code to engrave in a readable way), and I still haven't been able to generate them through software (right now they have to be put into illustrator before exporting them to the laser cutter). Lastly, engraving paper will likely incredibly difficult. On their page they have a sheet of paper that they engraved - I want to know how many attempts it took them before they got it to work - especially since the paper gets very easily caramelised. Maybe they had to use a special coating or used yellow/blue painters tape?

Despite all of this, laser cutters are extremely cool. The one we have cost $4000, and people have done lots of amazing things with it. Nowadays, you can get a 40w laser from ebay or aliexpress for a few hundred dollars, but do expect to spend weeks figuring out how to use it. The Glowforge looks like a pretty cool idea, however I don't know if they'll be able to survive at this price point + with the technology being at the state it is today. Their software (minus the part where it's cloud based), looks really powerful and very useful.

This would be a nightmare to make happen, you would need to bribe so many people to get a shipment here that your profit would be unworthy and also make you a criminal or you can run it by the lawn and never get the items or pay 100% taxes over them + their shipping costs making a machine like this cost U$5000,00

There are lots of customs fees involved that are not considered taxes per-se. But let's ignore them and look at taxes:

You get a 60% import tax right off the bat (this applies over the product cost, the aforementioned fees AND shipping). Then, there's ICMS, which varies by state (let's say, 12%). There's also IPI, which is variable according to the product and I'm not sure where a laser cutter would fit in. Also PIS (1.65%), COFINS (7.6%) and IOF since it probably involves currency exchange (0.38%).

Speaking of that... there's the unfavorable exchange rate. Today, the real hit a high of BRL 4.23 for one USD. It was 2.50 something one year ago, and then the economy blew up.

I'm not going to the trouble of trying to calculate the final price, without the importer's markup, but it will be HIGH. Good luck marketing this thing to anything other than medium businesses. And that one year from now. You'll spend like an year incorporating your company and navigating the customs law mess.

There are other options, of course. Manufacturing locally would bypass a lot of taxes (and generate others). But then you could negotiate deals with local authorities in exchange for job creation and some strategic dinners. That sort of stuff. The opportunity cost of doing that is just huge and, by the time you managed all that, you'd be profitable in several other countries already.

Then you'll have to deal with the crappy transportation infrastructure. Forget shipping things by train, you'll have to use trucks. Delivery estimates of 30 business days are not uncommon at all.

My advice? Stay away from Brazil. Even more so this year. There's a reason investors are pulling money out of the country.

Disclaimer: I'm Brazilian.

As a kid, I had a lot of difficulty trying to ignite paper with lenses under the sun (white notebook paper). I then gave up and used the lenses for cutting instead. So I'm not that surprised.

To this day I wonder what would be the correct set of conditions that would make it easier to combust. I remember trying black paint - that only made the cutting part easier.

That said, it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the machine while it's running.

Yikes. Clogged extruders and many software problems:

http://nicklievendag.com/makerbot-replicator-5th-generation-...

Cool use of javascript.

If you use the filter, there's nothing else hanging off the back of the device except a power cord. (My old laser had a squirrel cage fan, an aquarium pump, and a chiller tethered to it at all times!)

>but I think the main pro is (like a Tesla) the machine's performance and usability can be improved without you installing any new software.

is likely referring to them updating their cloud infrastructure, not the machine. By centralizing the processing and whatever else, they can ignore some local machine updating.

Its not worth the massive drawbacks, but its likely the truth wrapped in that marketing speak.

The trick would be the care and feeding of the software. But as the industry moves to more immutable infrastructure -- especially stuff like AWS lambda and JAWS -- this will become less of an issue.

The Glowforge does require a cloud connection to operate. We use cloud vs. local a host of reasons including the motion planner, alignment, image recognition, and faster feature development.

But based on the excellent point made here that nobody wants a paperweight if we fall off the globe, we decided to make a change. We're going to do a GPL release of the firmware so people can do whatever they want, including porting offline functionality. You buy it, it's yours, you should get to do what you want with it.

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

Thanks for the great feedback.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9055330

I would also like very much to know the answer to this question.

I'm certainly not an expert in many areas (Lasers for one), including many of the areas that these products pop up in, so when something seems too good to be true (or if I happen to have said expertise) the first thing I do is hop over to comments to see what the rest of the community has to say.

I always try to take both links and comments with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism and try to come to my own conclusions. That's not easy to do if I only get one side of the story and I don't happen to have years of experience in the relevant fields.

A negative comment is one that doesn't contribute anything. A negative generalization about a community that doesn't provide an explanation could be seen as an example of a negative comment.

As a class of machine, they're just not as easy to use as, say, an inkjet printer. As I said, the camera feature looks nice, and according to danshapiro, they've done a lot to help with the maintenance issues by enclosing the optics.

Come on man, it says right there.