Originally Posted by
Art Mann
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.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.