subtractive rather than additive. The Glowforge makes building things in three dimensions—a four-foot tall doll house, for example—relatively easy because it cuts so precisely, even if the material is non-uniform.
This part really blew my mind. Wood, as anyone who works with it knows, is rarely uniform. Slight deviations in thickness can mean your doll house walls won’t fit together, ruining the project. The Glowforge’s computer vision system creates a 3D model of the material, precisely measuring thickness. The software accounts for imperfections in the material relative to the plan and adapts the plan and the cuts it makes accordingly, in real time, Shapiro says.
Witness the power of cloud computing—Google’s cloud, to be specific.
“We can dedicate a supercomputer to making your dollhouse for a fraction of a second, instead of having a desktop or an embedded computer cranking away forever trying to figure it out,” Shapiro says.
That’s a prime example of how Shapiro and the Glowforge team approached the challenge of creating an inexpensive (relative to existing laser cutters), easy-to-use consumer device out of an industrial machine. The idea was to use commodity smartphone components instead of robotics equipment and cloud computing power instead of local computing resources wherever possible.
Building 3D objects from the two-dimensional panels produced in a laser cutter obviously requires detailed plans to get all the tabs and notches to line up. (Designs can be made using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, AutoCAD, and Inkscape.) Glowforge recognizes this might be a barrier to many users, particularly when they’re just starting out. So it has created a catalog of ready-to-go project plans, some of which will cost extra and may come from third parties and brands.
For example, the Glowforge team made an excellent Settlers of Catan board using a variety of hardwoods for tiles. It has an agreement with the game’s English-language publisher, Mayfair Games, Shapiro says. Stay tuned for more, he says.
Another option for making things with Glowforge is “trace mode.” I think this is the one my daughters will engage with first. You can draw directly on the material you’d like to cut or engrave. The Glowforge scans the drawing and then implements the cut. Shapiro says his kids cut out sheriff’s badges for dress-like-a-cowboy day at school (for the win). He says it’s easy enough to do things like make a wrench out of wood just by tracing the bolt he needs to turn.
In addition to premium designs, Glowforge will sell material specially coated with an ultraviolet barcode that the cutter can read and identify easily, automatically adjusting the power of the laser for the given job.
Glowforge isn’t saying yet the cost of premium plans, materials, or a replacement laser. The laser is expected to last more than two years with regular, daily use. The replacement cost will be in the low hundreds of dollars. I have a bit of trepidation about this tool’s lifetime costs, but it obviously wasn’t enough to stop me from purchasing.
We’re also waiting to hear where the Glowforge will be manufactured. Its parts come from manufacturers around the world, but no, Dale Chihuly is not producing the hand-blown glass tubes for the laser. Not yet, anyway.
