OpenGlow/ForgeFIRM Firmware for Glowforge

⚠️ IN DEVELOPMENT — NOT YET RELEASED

ForgeFIRM has no public release yet. No images are published, nothing here is installable, and there is no supported way to put this on a machine. The documentation describes the firmware as it is being built and validated on the bench — it is here to be read, not followed.

If you come across a file claiming to be a ForgeFIRM image, it did not come from this project.

What this costs

Nothing. It cost nothing yesterday, it costs nothing today, and if anyone ever charges you for it, it wasn't this project.

ForgeFIRM is free in both senses: free as in beer, free as in speech. All of it is public. The image, the build layers, the kernel module, the control daemon, the grblHAL driver, the cloud client, down to the brackets you print. The licenses (MIT and GPL) are the standard ones, and any lawyer will tell you they're not a trap. Read it, build it, change it, pass it on.

No paid tier. No license key, no subscription, no activation, no Pro edition, no feature parked behind a paywall. Nothing is held back for a rainy day, mostly because there's no plan for a rainy day.

The work happens in public, including the parts that don't work yet, which are written up with more candor than flatters anyone. There's no product page. No waitlist, no pre-order, no backer, no launch, nothing to buy. Anyone who spends their evenings deleting sales pitches has earned the reflex to suspect one more, so don't take a stranger's word for it. Ten minutes with the licenses and the commit log settles it, which beats trust on both cost and accuracy. Questions are welcome at the community forum.

If someone offers to sell you this firmware, the licenses allow it and nobody's calling it theft. Just note that you'd be paying for something that's given away, and that what you take home is their build, not this one: a stranger's code, running a laser that has no opinion about what it burns. Get it from the source. Same price everywhere, and here you get to read what you're running.

Open-source firmware for Glowforge brand CNC lasers. ForgeFIRM replaces the cloud-dependent factory software on the stock control board — no hardware modification — and gives the machine a local controller, a local web control panel, and a standard Grbl interface.

• Latest Release
• Installation Instructions
• Build Instructions
• Connecting LightBurn
• How motion and the laser are driven
• How cooling and airflow work
• The cameras and the video stream
• How the laser safing works
• How a release is accepted
• Community Support

What it does

Two controller modes, selected in the web panel and switchable while the machine is idle:

• GRBL mode — grblHAL runs on the machine and speaks Grbl 1.1 over TCP port 23, so LightBurn, UGS, and cncjs drive the laser directly. Motion runs on the board's own hardware step engine (SDMA + EPIT), fed live by the planner. M3/M4 dynamic laser power, coolant-flow verification, over-temp holds, and an operator button press to arm the laser for each job.
• Cloud mode — the machine presents itself as a stock Glowforge to the Glowforge web service, so the phone and web apps work as they always did. Optional, and off by default. GRBL mode jogs and cuts without it; the one GRBL-mode function that still reaches the Glowforge service is camera-referenced homing (below), until limit-switch homing lands.

Around both modes:

• A web control panel on port 8080: machine status and position, coolant and fan telemetry, safety-switch states, camera view, machine settings, hardware diagnostics, firmware updates, and boot-slot management.
• Camera-referenced homing: $H from any sender runs the factory-style camera homing cycle through the Glowforge service (a Glowforge account and a live service session are required for $H; everything else in GRBL mode runs without them), and the machine records where it is.
• Cameras only capture with the lid closed. The lid camera faces the room once the lid is raised, so ForgeFIRM refuses every capture — live view, snapshot, and anything the Glowforge service asks for in cloud mode — until the enclosure is shut, and stops a running stream the moment the lid opens. See the cameras and the video stream.

Hardware

The control board is common to Glowforge Basic, Plus, and Pro. The 5 MP (OV5648) camera modules are fully supported and hardware-validated. The 8 MP (OV8856) modules found in "HD" units have a complete capture path — the kernel patches, device tree and sensor-aware capture profile they need are all in the build, but it has never run on an 8 MP machine, so treat it as untested; see docs/BRINGUP.md (Next work, cameras) and the headers of kernel patches 0011-0013 in meta-glowforge-bsp.

Safety

These machines contain a CO₂ laser: it burns, blinds, and starts fires. Never defeat the lid switches or interlock. Never leave a running job unattended — keep a fire extinguisher within reach. Read Before you cut — safety before your first job, and the Regulatory and legal section before installing. How the laser safing works describes the hardware safety chain and the software gates ForgeFIRM stacks on it.

A very important warning: this is experimental software. Use of this software could seriously maim or kill you or others, and voids your warranty. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Glowforge. Use it at your own risk.