Installation¶

This section tells you what you need, how ForgeFIRM replaces the factory firmware, how the factory firmware is backed up and how you return to it, how to update, and how to recover. Read Safety first, and Regulatory and legal before you install.

Regulatory and legal¶

Modifying the machine, including replacing its firmware, may have legal and regulatory ramifications. It is up to you, the end user, to make sure that you adhere to all laws, regulations, certifications, and insurance terms that apply where you are. The project cannot advise you on them.

Cloud mode and the other features that reach Glowforge's servers are yours to use within that vendor's terms of service. Staying inside them is the user's responsibility, and the project cannot advise you on those either.

Glowforge is a trademark of Glowforge, Inc. ForgeFIRM is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Glowforge, Inc., and the mark is used here only to say which machine this firmware runs on.

ForgeFIRM is free software under MIT and GPL licenses, and the text of this site is CC BY-SA 4.0 (Licenses). There is nothing to buy, and if someone offers to sell it to you, what you take home is their build rather than this one: get it from the source (What this costs).

What you need¶

• A stock Glowforge Basic, Plus, or Pro. The control board is common to all three, and nothing on it is modified.
• Recommended: the gantry stops, installed first.
• Serial console access. The factory firmware does not offer SSH and does not support installing firmware that is not signed by Glowforge, so the install runs at the console (login root, no password).
• About 300 MB free on /data (a factory machine has far more).
• Internet access on the machine for the standard flow. For an offline install, place a forgefirm.fw on /data beforehand and pass its path to the installer.
• A ForgeFIRM release that ships the forgefirm.fw asset (0.0.1 or later; every 0.0.x release is a beta).

A replacement, with a way back¶

ForgeFIRM replaces the factory firmware. It is not a second system that runs next to it. Before the installer writes anything, it archives the factory firmware to /data (below), and you can restore the factory firmware from that archive whenever you wish (Back to the factory firmware).

The install and every later update use the factory's own update mechanism: the onboard storage (4GB eMMC) carries two 200 MiB rootfs slots, a signed .fw archive is applied to the slot that is not running, the result is verified, and the boot selection moves to it. Nothing is repartitioned, and the factory /data partition (settings, credentials, logs) is untouched and keeps its full factory size. The invariants that every flash path obeys are in Install and update; the eMMC layout is in Boot and storage.

The factory firmware is archived first¶

Before anything is overwritten, the installer archives every factory firmware version on the machine, both rootfs slots and the recovery boot partitions, to /data/forgefirm/archive/. A full offline factory restore is therefore always possible, with no Glowforge cloud required. The archive holds factory-rootfs-<ver>.img.gz for each factory version, boot0.img and boot1.img, and a manifest with the slot versions, dates, and checksums. A restore runs from the control panel (Back to the factory firmware).

The first boot¶

After the install the machine boots into ForgeFIRM, and the serial console prints the panel's addresses. Open https://<ip>/, accept the browser's certificate warning once, and complete the setup (Setup). Root has no password and works at the serial console only. SSH is off until you turn it on from the panel, and it opens with the account the setup creates (Install).