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Technology
Alphabet subsidiary X, which is the former Google X, focuses exclusively on ambitious &moonshots,& or applications of tech you might expect are science fiction, not a real product in development. Like a robot that can sort through office trash.
X does a lot of its work more quietly than other Alphabet companies — until itready to share some of its progress. It has reached that point with the Everyday Robot Project, an ongoing effort that X has been working on for &the past couple of years,& according to project lead Hans Peter Brondmo, who in a Medium post today shed some light on what the project is and what it does.
Brondo compares robotics today to computing in the 1950s and 60s — ita working reality, but ithappening in dedicated spaces and the only people interacting with them on the regular are specially trained computer operators, using them for professional purposes. The challenge, then, is to usher in an era of robotics akin to the era of consumer computing — in other words, how do we get to a world where ordinary people live and interact with robots every day?
The challenges are both more mundane and more complex than you might imagine: They have everything to do with stuff we take for granted every day, like other people walking around, trash bins that are out at the curb one day and gone the next, furniture that moves around, different weather conditions and just about anything you can think of thata pretty normal part of everyday life but hard to predict exactly day-to-day. Robots work best with specificity and exactness, especially when it comes to programming.
The Everyday Robot Project knew this, and quickly determined that to create robots that are genuinely useful to actual people going about their lives, the key was to &teach& rather than &program,& according to Brondmo. That meant working with the team at Google AI, first in a lab setting, and then out in the world. Thatwhere it arrived at the robot itdetailing today: One it successfully taught to sort through garbage at Xown offices.
The robot, trained via simulation and reinforcement learning, among other techniques, managed to actually reduce the level of waste contamination (putting the wrong garage in the wrong place and causing the whole contents of that bin to go to the landfill instead of being recycled, for instance) from around 20% to less than 5. If you&ve ever worked in a building that is certified as green by some kind of officially recognized standard, then you might know how impressive this actually is in terms of overall impact.
Aside from actually making a significant dent in the amount of unneeded waste heading to a landfill from a sizeable office, this development helps X prove out some of the feasibility of its ultimate goal of making robots everyday affairs for most people. Therestill a long ways to go before robots are commonplace companions — the smartphones we carry around everywhere, in the general computing analogy — but this is a step in that direction.
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Google is under fire again for its treatment of employees. Tomorrow, a group of Google employees is holding a rally and press conference to speak out against the companydecision to place two employees on indefinite administrative leave.
Earlier this month, Google fired one employee and put two, Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers, on leave for allegedly violating company policies. At the time, Google said one had searched for and shared confidential documents that were not pertinent to their job, and one had looked at the individual calendars of some staffers. Both Berland and Rivers are set to speak tomorrow at the rally.
This news was reported earlier by Forbes& Jillian D&Onfro.
&The company is claiming that it is for looking up calendars and documents, which is something we all do, but we know that it is punishment for speaking up for themselves and others,& workers organizing at Google said in a press release. &We are demanding that Google bring these workers back to work immediately.&
They went on to say that the &attack& on Rivers and Berland &is an attack on all people who care about transparency and accountability for tech.& Organizers pointed to how Rivers helped create the petition to demand Google end its contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and how Berland has participated in a number of worker-organized campaigns, including the one resisting YouTuberole in facilitating hate speech.
&Ita brute force intimidation attempt to silence workers and make it harder for us to fight back on issues of systemic racism, sexual harassment, harmful technologies, hate speech on our platforms, and business relationships with organizations that engage in human rights abuses,& organizers said.
Since the massive employee-led walkout last November, organizers say Google has tried to undermine further attempts to organize. In July, walkout co-organizer Meredith Whittaker left the company following reports of retaliation in April. Organizers of tomorrowrally also say Google has implemented new policies, like accessing need-to-know data a fireable offense.Organizers of the rally say both Rivers and Berland were put on leave for &simply looking at openly shared internal information.&
The rally will start at 11 a.m. at GoogleSan Francisco office at 345 Spear Street. I&ve reached out to Google and will update this story if I hear back.
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Read more: Google employees will rally in protest of alleged worker retaliation
Write comment (90 Comments)Netgear has released the first updated Canvas digital art from from Meural since acquiring the company last September, and the next-generation connected frame comes with some decent quality-of-life improvements as well as a new, additional size. Itnot a dramatic change from the original Meural Canvas, but it means that a product that was already great is now even better.
The Meural Canvas II from Netgear comes in two sizes, including a smaller 16×24-inch frame that provides a 21.5-inch diagonal picture (starting at $399.95), and a 19×29-inch frame with a 27-inch diagonal display (starting at $599.95). Both screens are 1080P full HD resolution, and both feature ambient light sensors (which are relocated to a better location under the mat that surrounds the screen for improved light detection) that will automatically adjust the brightness of your image to make it appear more natural and less like a screen.
The Canvas II features built-in Wi-Fi, which is also upgraded with this generation (Netgear, which makes routers and other Wi-Fi products, seems to have brought its expertise to bear here) and they offer new Ethernet connectivity, as well as full-size SD ports. They also can hang either vertically or horizontally, and a new accessory mount for this generation (sold separately) allows for even easier switching between the two orientations via simple rotation.
For the virtual art collector
Meural is controlled primarily from the Meural companion app, though you can also access a web interface to accomplish much of the same thing from a desktop browser. The app features curated collections of artwork, which is available both via a paid monthly subscription and via direct, one-time purchases. One of the changes that the Meural service has undergone is that the subscription membership now gets you some, but not all, of the art available — some premium content is still an additional charge. Itdefinitely not as good from the userperspective as when everything was free once you&d paid the subscription fee, but paying monthly still nets you 20GB of cloud storage for uploading your own art, discounts on the stuff that is available for purchase and access to a much larger library than you get without any membership.
Subscriptions go for either $8.95 per month, or $69.95 per year, and they&re probably plenty to satisfy most casual art lovers who just want some recognizable or interesting works to adorn their walls, and want to be able to change that on a fairly regular basis. And when you use the art provided through Meuralvarious collections, you can take a look at credits and descriptions right on the display — available quickly via a motion control swipe up gesture made possibly by the sensors built into the frame.
A note on those motion controls — they allow you to navigate between artwork, and even change playlists and access a menu of other options related to the frame. Basically, you wave your hand near the bottom of the Meural to make this work, and itgreat when it does work, but it definitely takes some learning to figure out how and where to swipe to make it reliably respond. Itconvenient that itan option, but controlling the display with the iOS or Android app is a lot more pleasant, generally speaking.
The built-in library that Meural provides is definitely a selling point, and Meural is regularly adding new art collections, both for paid purchases and to build out the library of those works available included in the subscription. It just added a bunch through a new partnership with Marvel, in fact, including movie posters from a long list of their cinematic universe releases.
For the amateur/enthusiast/pro photographer
The primary reason I think the Meural Canvas II is a fantastic product has very little to do with its subscription-based art collection, however. Instead, itall about the flexibility and convenience that the Canvas provides when it comes to displaying your own photos. Itincredibly easy to upload your photos from your mobile device or your desktop, and you can organize them in playlists, add descriptions and titles, and crop them manually or have the frame crop them automatically to display in its 16×9 aspect ratio.
As a display for your own photos, the Meural Canvas II is hard to beat: Ita lot more flexible and cost effective than getting high-quality prints made, as you can rotate them out as often as you feel like, and the displaycolor rendering and matte finish, while obviously not as good as a professional photo print, is nonetheless very pleasing to the eye. When you take as many photos as we collectively do now, but seldom have anywhere to show them off, the Canvas provides the perfect opportunity to ensure they have a great place to shine at home.
The included SD card reader means iteasy to load up images and put them on the Canvas locally, but I also found that uploading from whatever Wi-Fi-connected device I had access to around the house was easy and fast (again, seems like Netgearcore expertise came into play here). The ability to quickly change the orientation, which is fast and simple even without the rotation mount accessory, is another big plus for your own photos, as it means you can show off both portraits and landscapes.
Oh, and the ability to load your own artwork isn&t limited to just your photography, of course — any image in a standard format, including animated GIFs, can work on the Meural, which means itreally only limited by the scope of whatavailable on the internet.
Bottom line
Between the frame options, which you can swap out for different color options eventually when they&re sold separately, and the ability to upload your own content to the Canvas, iteasily the most customizable piece of home decor you can find right now. For some, opting to move up to something like SamsungThe Frame TV might be a better option, but thatmuch larger, much more expensive, much heavier for mounting and not as flexible when it comes to playlists and your own curation of art to display.
The Meural Canvas II provides largely the same visual experience as the generation it replaces, but the other improvements make this a much better product overall, with faster, more reliable Wi-Fi connectivity, improved motion controls, more flexible on-device storage and new mounting options. If you like some variety in your wall art, or you&ve just been trying to figure out how to do something interesting with all those pictures you take, the Meural Canvas II is a great option.
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Read more: Netgear’s Meural Canvas II is a better version of the best home gadget for photographers
Write comment (90 Comments)Michael Grimes has been dubbed &Wall StreetSilicon Valley whisperer& for landing a seemingly endless string of coveted deals for his bank, Morgan Stanley. The sprawling financial institution has served as the lead underwriter for Facebook, Spotify and Slack. Grimes, a banker for 32 years — 25 of them with Morgan Stanley — has also played a role in the IPOs of Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday and hundreds of other companies.
Because some of these offerings have gone better than others, buzzy startups and their investors are asking Morgan Stanley and other investment banks to embrace more direct listings, a maneuver pioneered by Spotify and copied by Slack — rather than sell a percentage of shares to the public in a fundraising event, companies essentially move all their stock from the private markets to public ones in one fell swoop.
In a rare public appearance last week, Grimes told us why he supports direct listings and answered questions about other offerings in which Morgan Stanley has been involved, including as a lead underwriter for both Uber and Google. (He was less talkative about WeWork, a company that Morgan Stanley managed to distance itself from at exactly the right time.) If you care about how the process of taking private companies public may be changing, itworth the time. Our conversation has been edited lightly for length.
TechCrunch: Tell us about yourself. You were born in East L.A.; you studied computer programming and electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, then you became a banker, and you&ve remained one. Did you always want to be a banker?
Michael Grimes: I&ve only ever done this since i was 20. I&d joined Salomon Brothers, which later became part of Citigroup. They had a tech group where they wanted somebody in tech. I didn&t know banking or business or finance, because I had studied engineering and that made me not well-suited, to some degree, [for a bank] other than for a tech bank. Mary Meeker also started in &87 at Solomon and [we then worked together for 20 years at Morgan Stanley until she left].
The work you&ve done with a lot of these amazing companies that you&ve helped take public has earned you a lot of nicknames — the ‘Teflon banker,& the ‘kingpin& banker. How do you feel when you see yourself described in those terms?
It may sound boring but may be similar to the way venture capitalist serve founders. Besides capital, they&re giving advice. We think of it as giving advice: that decision to file, do you or don&t you, how will it be received. That decision may work out for the best. Therea lot of volatility in the market and it may not. But we want to stick with clients through thick and thin and help them navigate really volatile markets.
When a company is [at an] emerging growth [phase] but hasn&t reached a mature business model, you can have a really wide variety of fair cases for, is this going to be worth $30 billion in five years? $3 billion? $200 billion? Those could are all possible if something is growing 100 percent per year and the margins are increasing and you can do the math. [Remember that] Google has gone from $30 billion when we took it public to $800 billion or $900 billion or whatever is it [now]. So is this going to be that, or is this going to grow and peak and recede? Therea huge amount of volatility inherent in tech investing, and that kind of comes with the territory in our business.
People seem to speak in hushed tones about you the way they earlier spoke about [earlier Silicon Valley banker] Frank Quattrone, but Frank Quattrone had a reputation for taking on deals that others wouldn&t take; you have a reputation for saying no to deals when they don&t feel right. When is a company in shape to go public?
We try to predict the receptivity of the public markets, which does change. There were times in 1999, 2007, maybe 2015 until recently, where institutional investors were taking more risk, then there are other times when they&re taking less risk: 2001, 2002, maybe now to an extent; they&re taking less risk than they were a year ago.
The institutional investors are the price setters; if they&re eager to invest in a company, then we try to predict that and get behind the companies that we think will work well there, or [else] give the company advice that this maybe isn&t the right time or maybe this won&t be well-received. We aren&t perfect at this but we kind of obsess about it.
You&ve told me that you think the more established the company, the more observable its metrics, the less volatile the offering in all likelihood. But can a company stay private too long?
It depends on what you mean by &too long.& If they run out of capital because they aren&t financeable, you could argue thatprobably a good thing that they never went public, because investor protection matters. Healthy markets depend upon investors, on balance, earning a return — not just institutions but retail investors, the ordinary investor. So if it turns out ita company that thrives but went public later, thereno real harm there… I haven&t really bought into the theory of companies waiting too long to go public. Thattheir choice. They have to decide based on their capital. Going back to the late &80s or &90s, I&ve worked with companies that have gone out with $300 million, $400 million, $500 million valuations; I&ve worked with ones that have gone out at $30 billion, $40 billion, $100 billion valuations. In all cases, it really depends on the companyfundamentals and performance as opposed to its stage.
You mention companies that aren&t financeable. It brings to mind WeWork. Obviously its S-1 was disaster, but it also really needed the money from an offering. Could things have gone another way for the company? Was there a way for it to go public?
We weren&t involved in that filing so I&m probably not the right guy to opine on that situation.
Do you think JPMorgan deserves all the heat itgotten for that situation?
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Read more: Morgan Stanley’s ‘Teflon banker’ talks direct listings and much more
Write comment (96 Comments)Summer camp for adults and beloved tech-free weekend getaway Camp Grounded ground to a halt in 2017. Its big-hearted founder, Levi Felix, who&d espoused the joys of trading screens for nature walks, was tragically killed by brain cancer at just age 32. Left in his wake was a mourning community that had lost their digital detox rally just as everyone was realizing the importance of looking up from their phones.
As an attendee, I&d been impressed by how the founder (known as Professor Fidget Wigglesworth at camp) used playfulness and presence to transport us back to childhood, before we got hooked on the internet. But he also broke peopleaddiction to shame, mandating that anyone who screwed up in a sports game or talent show announce &I&m awesome,& and be met with a cheer from the crowd, &you&re awesome!&
Attendees compete in camp-wide games
Luckily, one of Felixelementary school friends, Forest Bronzan, wants to write a happier ending to this story. Almost three years after it went into hibernation following its creatordeath, Bronzan has acquired Camp Grounded and its parent company Digital Detox .
Camp Grounded will relaunch in May 2020 as two back-to-back weekend retreats at Northern Californiagorgeous Camp Mendocino. Attendees will again leave their devices in Tech Check lockers run by hazmat-suit wearing staffers, assume nicknames and stop the work talk. They&ll get to play in the woods like technology never existed, indulging in Camp Grounded favorites, from archery to arts - crafts to bonfire singalongs about enthusiastic consent. However, to simplify logistics, Camp Grounded will no longer hold sessions in New York, North Carolina or Texas.
The company will also organize more four-hour Unplugged Nights in cities around the country where partiers can switch off their phones and make new friends. The idea is to give a broader range of people a taste of the Grounded lifestyle in smaller doses. Those interested in early access to tickets for all of Digital Detoxevents can sign up here.
Camp GroundedTech Check staffers confiscate attendees& devices upon their arrival (Image Credit: Daniel N. Johnson)
Meanwhile, Digital Detox will start a new business of education and certifications for K-12 schools, coaching teachers and parents on how to gently reduce students& screentime. Schools will pay per student like a Software-as-a-Service model. Through research by a few PhDs, the company will recommend proper rules for using tech in and out of the classroom to minimize distraction, and empathetic penalties for violations.
The obvious question to ask, though, is if Bronzan is just some business guy coming to coin off the anti-tech trend and Felixlegacy. &I&m not Apple coming in and buying the company. This isn&t a tech acquisition,& Bronzan insists at a coffee shop in San Francisco. &I knew Levi before anyone else knew Levi. We went trick-or-treating and played in school band together. I went to the first Digital Detox summit, and brought my company year after year. I&ve been involved from the beginning, seeing Levipassion and inspiration.&
Levi Felix and Forest Bronzan (from left) in 1996
Fidget had an innately soothing camp counselor vibe to him that Bronzan doesn&t quite capture. He&d previously built and sold Email Aptitude, a CRM and email agency, not an event or education business. But he truly seems to mean well, and heearned the support of Digital Detoxteam.
&My mission was to find someone that was as excited and ferocious as Levi and I were when we started Digital Detox to further it as a movement,& says Brooke Dean, Felixwife and co-founder. &It was imperative that the person running DD and CG had actually experienced the magic. This person had to be more than a lover of camp and nature, they also needed the hard skills and successful track record of running a company. Forest is stable, business-minded and also finds value in that very unique magic.&
Brooke Dean and Levi Felix (foreground, from left) at Camp Grounded
Bronzan tells me the acquisition includes a cash component (&We&re not talking eight figures&) and a capital investment in the business, both funded by his email companyexit. Two other individuals and one company had also expressed interest. Dean and Felixbrother Zev will retain equity in the company, and she&ll stay on the board of directors. The trio are launching the Levi Felix Foundation that will donate money to brain cancer research.
While moving into education might seem like a left turn for Digital Detox after throwing events since 2012, Dean says, &Levi was planning on going back to school and was deeply interested in being an academic in this field. We always believed that there needed to be evidence in order to convince the masses that being outside and connecting with other human beings ‘IRL& is critical to our health and longevity.&
Some alarming stats the organization has already uncovered include:
- 77% of people check or pretend to check their phone to avoid talking to others
- 38% feel less connected to their partner or close friend due to cell phone use
- Nearly 20% check their phone while having sex
&We want to eventually be the central source of tools on how tech is affecting lives and relationships at all age levels,& Bronzan tells me. Itzeroing in on how compulsive behaviors like endless scrolling increase anxiety and depression, and how parents glued to their devices train children to not be present. The father of two kids under age five, Bronzan knows a weekend at camp in your 20s or 30s is too little too late to seriously address the crisis of fractured attention.
Digital Detoxnew CEO says heheartened by the progression of some of Felixideals, as with the Time Well Spent movement. The screentime dashboards launched by tech companies don&t do enough to actually change peopleactions, he says, though, &They&re at least making some effort.& Digital Detox plans to launch a comprehensive quiz to determine how addicted you are to your phone, and Bronzan says he&d happily work with tech giants to integrate his companyresearch.
On the camp for adults front, we&ve seen Burning Man go mainstream but lose some of what made it special, including a lack of cell phone reception. Itnow common to see people on the playa staring at their phones, talking about work, and stressed about the clock — all of which are prohibited at Camp Grounded. Festivals like Coachella seem to get more corporate and less mindful each year. That leaves plenty of open space for Digital Detox to fill with purposeful breaks from the default world.
Bronzan also wants to introduce more surprise and serendipity to the event calendar. Camp Grounded will experiment with a &Mystery Trip& where eight to 10 people sign up to be whisked away, only receiving a confidential briefing package the day before they show up. The point is to extract people from their routines where unhealthy habits manifest. Without connectivity, Camp Grounded hopes people will forge new connections in their minds, and with each other.
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Read more: Camp Grounded Digital Detox returns after founder’s death
Write comment (93 Comments)Laser cutters are in a fun place right now. Gone are the days when the cheapest machines were tens of thousands of dollars, and when the &compact& models were roughly the size of a freezer. They&ve gotten affordable enough, and small enough, that a DIY home hobbyist can add it to their toolset without taking out a second mortgage or needing much more than some desk space… but they&re still a rare enough machine that saying &I&ve got a laser cutter!& makes people look at you like you&re a friggin& wizard.
One of the latest entries into this space is beamo, a compact, 30W laser cutter and engraver built by Flux — a Taiwan-based team you might remember for raising $1.6 million on Kickstarter with its Flux Delta 3D printer/scanner/engraver back in 2014.
As with Delta, Flux is turning to Kickstarter for the launch of beamo. They sprinted past their goal of $25,000 pretty quickly, currently sitting at roughly $350,000 raised with a little over a week to go. The early-bird models are going for $849, with the company pinning the final MSRP at $1,500. Shipping/taxes aren&t included in those prices, and can cost a couple hundred bucks, so factor that in to any purchasing decisions.
While I tend to be a bit hesitant when it comes to crowdfunded hardware (having been burned too many times by products that either never arrived or did arrive only to be total garbage), Flux has been down this road before; in addition to Delta, it also crowdfunded and shipped Beambox (a slightly bigger, pricier, but more powerful laser cutter) just a few months back. In the case of beamo, it seems like the Kickstarter is primarily meant to help get the word out, rather than literally &kickstarting& the process. Production is already underway, and units are already rolling off the line.
Flux sent me one of those early units to check out for a few weeks. I haven&t had it long enough to do what I&d call a &review&; with things like laser cutters with their myriad moving parts and… you know, lasers, new issues can pop up months after you open the box, as components wear and maintenance is required. So consider this more of a &first impressions& kind of thing.
My first impressions, though, are good.
For reference, I&d classify myself laser experience as… moderate. More than most people you&d randomly ask, I&d wager, but less than if it were my job. I&ve put a hundred hours or so into training/creating with those aforementioned freezer-sized pro lasers, making everything from custom etched pint glasses, to bespoke Christmas ornaments, to personalized rubber stamps over the years. I tend to look for excuses to shoot lasers at things.
Getting it running
My beamo unit came ready to go right out of the box, mirrors aligned, moving parts all lubed up. I plugged it in, set up some basic ventilation, ran through about 10 minutes of software installation and configuration and started firing away. It all just worked on the first shot.
Speaking of ventilation: you&ll need it. Laser cutting is basically a tiny, super controlled fire… and that means smoke. Depending on what you&re cutting, that smoke can be super noxious. Cutting wood? It won&t smell too bad, but itstill not something you want in your lungs on the regular. Etching a logo into felt? It&ll smell like you&re burning a trash can full of hair. Beamo uses a 200CFM exhaust fan to pull smoky air out of the machine, dumping it out through a 4″ exhaust hose that you&ll need to run through a window (or, if you&re feeling extra fancy, a dryer exhaust-style vent through a wall.) Expect to need about 8″ of clearance between the machine and any wall behind it for the exhaust hose and its bends, unless the path to the window is a straight shot.
The exhaust system is decent, but you&ll probably need to fiddle with how the hose runs to get it just right. If you&re venting through a window, you&ll want to figure out a way of sealing up the open gaps around the hose to limit any fumes that might float back into the room. Put time into getting it right. If the room still smells smokey hours after you&ve cut, you&ll want to keep working on your ventilation. You don&t want to breath that stuff in, especially if you&re running the laser more than occasionally.
Beamobuilt-in touchscreen. You&ll mostly control it over Wi-Fi, but you can access some basic functionality and monitor job progress here.
If you&re new to laser cutting, you should also put the time into learning what you shouldn&t put in these machines. Some materials are safe to laser cut, but tend to catch on fire easily. Some materials will just melt and screw up your machine. Other things (PVC!) will straight up emit chlorine gas when you hit them with a laser. If you&re moving beyond the basics of cutting thin wood/acrylic/cardboard or engraving glass, research it.
So what SHOULD you cut? Woods are a good go-to (though you&ll want to limit it to less oily stuff — because, again, fire). Cardboard is fun to cut for things like spray paint stencils. Leather is good, with practice, and you can do all sorts of really neat stuff with acrylic. You can&t cut glass, but you can engrave it; same goes for rubber, though thatone you&ll want to source from a place that sells materials known to be laser safe.
The thickness of the material you can cut tends to be limited by a laserwattage, while height/width is generally limited by the size of the work area. At 30W, beamolaser can slice its way through wood about 1/8″ thick; its work area, meanwhile, comes in at 11.81″ x 8.27″. You can make a lot of cool stuff within those bounds, but be aware of them — buying a bunch of material only to get it home and realize you&re a few watts short of a complete cut is a bummer. If you foresee needing deeper cuts or bigger pieces, beefier lasers exist without too massive a leap in price. As examples: Fluxother laser cutter, the $2,500 Beambox, bumps the laser up to 40W and the work area up to 15.7″ x 14.7″; the $2,500 base model from competitor Glowforge comes in at 40W with a work area of roughly 11″ x 19.5″.
(One potential advantage of beamo over the companypreviously released Beambox: whereas Beambox requires you to regularly fill up a water cooling reservoir to keep it running, beamowater cooling is closed-loop, so the same water just keeps circulating. I&m interested to see how this holds up over time.)
Fire the lasers!
Got everything plugged in, ventilation set up and your materials purchased? Time to cut! Well, almost.
You&ll mostly be controlling beamo through Beam Studio, a free piece of software provided by Flux for Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. As far as laser cutting software goes, I&m really quite pleased with it so far.
Beam Studio is super straightforward, but darn powerful for a free companion app. If you&re looking to cut out basic shapes, etch text or lay down some bezier curves, it can do it. Want to etch a picture of your dog into some wood to make a keychain? Just drop an image onto the work area, scale as desired, then move a slider to tweak the black/white threshold until it looks right. You can work in layers, setting up a raster layer to be etched and then a vector layer to cut it out immediately after.
Beamo has a built-in camera system, allowing you to quickly scan the work bed before dragging and dropping your designs wherever you want them. The first time you connect to beamo, you&ll be asked to calibrate the camera — a process that was considerably simpler than I expected. Put a piece of paper on the work bed, and beamo will fire a quick test pattern into it. Beam Studio will then snap a picture of what it just etched, projecting an overlay of where it thinks the test pattern is versus its scan. Nudge the overlay around until everything is perfectly stacked, and you&re set. You&ll want to re-run this alignment process every once in a while (itquick) if you need precise placement.
The camera system here really is incredibly useful. After about 30 minutes with beamo, I was doing things that are at best annoying on camera-less cutters — things like etching a design, cutting it out, then immediately flipping the cut piece and etching on the other side without worrying about precarious placement. I just rescanned the work bed, dragged the image where I wanted it on the freshly cut side B, and fired away.
The camera is quick, but not instant. Scanning the entire work area takes about 60 seconds. If you only need a certain area scanned (like, say, the top half of the work area, or the rough area around something you&ve already cut), fortunately, thatan option. Just drag the scanning boundary box accordingly.
If you need to do something beyond what the free software can handle (or if you just prefer working in apps like CorelDraw or Illustrator), Beam Studio can import JPGs, PNGs and SVGs.
While more capable than I expected, the software isn&t without its quirks. Beam Studio will try to keep you updated with a progress ticker, but don&t rely on it too much for predicting timing. I&ve had projects shoot up to 40% in the first 30 seconds, only to take five minutes for the rest to complete. There was an occasion or two where the software threw out an error in Mandarin that I didn&t want to dismiss without a quick pass through Google Translate… but for the most part, it was solid, stable and fun to use.
In its base configuration, beamolaser is manually focused, meaning you&ll need to focus things by hand each time you place new material inside the machine. Fortunately, focusing it is super straightforward: put material in, rotate a piece of acrylic attached to the laser head, lower the laser head until the acrylic is just barely touching the material, then lock the laser head back in place and lift the acrylic out of the way.
Flux says that it&ll ship a $250 add-on module that introduces autofocus to the mix, but I didn&t get to test that. They&re also working on a $499 rotary add-on that will let you etch designs onto cylindrical items (think shot/pint glasses), but out of the box, itflat stuff only.
As with every single laser I&ve ever worked with, working with a new material — or even, sometimes, the same material from a different source — requires some fiddling. You&ll be tweaking the speed at which the laser moves, the power of the laser and how many passes it makes over the same path; you want to keep the power low enough to minimize scorching and maximize the life of the laser, while making sure you&ve done enough repeat passes to cut completely through. Beam Studio comes with a bunch of presets for different materials that can get you pretty close (and you can save your own favorites, once you&ve found them), but expect to experiment a little when you&re working with a new material for the first time. Buy extra material.
As for noise: operating with fans running full force, itnot what I&d call &quiet,& but itnot so loud that ituncomfortable to sit next to. The companyspecs pin it at around 65 db — louder than your average conversation, but a bit quieter than, say, a vacuum. The fans do whir endlessly when the machine is idling, so you&ll probably want to cut the power between cutting sessions.
If for some reason you need to open the lid while the laser is operating, beamobuilt-in automatic kill switch will cut power to the laser to protect your eyes. Close the lid again and the job can be resumed right from where you left off. While the company says that the acrylic lid provides sufficient eye protection for beamo30W Class 1 laser (though they note that you shouldn&t stare right at the laser beam, lid or not), I absolutely recommend picking up and wearing a pair of CO2 laser safety goggles, especially when it comes time to pop the machine open and do any maintenance. Speaking of…
Foreseeable maintenance
Maintenance is an inevitable part of owning a laser cutter. As noted, I&ve only had the laser set up for a few weeks and everything came well configured, so I haven&t had to go digging under the hood yet. If something suddenly breaks on me during my time with the cutter, I&ll update this post accordingly. But either way, maintenance will be part of the process for owners.
Even if nothing breaks unexpectedly, some of the parts involved are &consumable& and thus expected to wear down with use. The lens, mirror and laser tube, for example, are expected to last about a year with regular use, according to the companyestimates. The team says those parts should cost about $19, $9 and $139 to replace, respectively, and you&ll be able to buy them through their online store. Plan ahead for those recurring costs, and make sure you&re comfortable with the idea of eventually tearing the machine apart before you dive in.
You&ll also need to keep things clean to keep them operating well. Burning stuff dirties the optics, and dirty optics lead to weaker cuts and faster wear. You&ll want to pop the work bed out regularly to get rid of any debris, and keep all the moving bits lubed. Theremore to keeping a laser cutter working well than say, an inkjet printer.
Overall, though, so far so good. The machine looks pretty great on a table; itnot quite as shiny and Apple-y as a Glowforge, but it should blend into a home office or studio pretty easily. Itlight enough to be easily moved by two people, and took me all of a few minutes to get up and running. If you don&t mind the occasional software hiccup, can figure out sufficient ventilation, are mostly working on projects that fit within beamowattage/work area capabilities and are down to get under the hood for maintenance, beamo seems like a solid machine so far.
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