How can we reduce volunteer load for laser maintenance?

Space and infrastructure
1

Hi all,

First off, I want to thank the LCC for tirelessly working to keep the laser cutter up and running for member usage. It’s all volunteer time and they put a lot of effort into it.

What I’d like to highlight is that the laser seems to demand a great deal of skilled volunteer support. Here’s what I’ve compiled from the available slack history:

September 23rd - Laser bumped out of alignment - Out of Order
Fixed September 27th by TristanL by reseating print head. Now operational.

September 30th - Laser cutter Out of Order / misaligned
lukecyca, majicj, tristanL
the water in the cooler which was grungy and only about half full.

  • Fixed the leak in the cooler where the copper piping enters the cooler.
  • Cleaned all the laser mirrors
  • Aligned the laser mirrors

October 9th - Laser Cutter PC Out of Order
October 9th - lukecyca rebuilds raid drive

October 13th - laser down (lukecyca)

  • laser up - cause unknown

October 16th - laser maintenance (lukecyca)

  • power level capped at 65 percent
  • new optics required

October 20th - laser down

  • diagnosis and fix pending

So, looking at just this period from September 23 to October 20th shows 6 times where the laser cutter required high skilled volunteers to diagnosis and fix the issue. My main points here are:

  1. The laser is a tool enjoyed by the space as a whole
  2. It’s delicate and requires a lot of work to keep it going
  3. It places an unfair burden on limited volunteer resources with an even more limited knowledge resource pool

So here are a few proposals to bikeshed:

  1. Better monitoring of the laser cutter usage
  • I don’t know what this would entail. It could be anything from vibration sensors to video cameras
  1. Root cause analysis
  • what is the root cause of the mechanical failures?
  • how do we prevent them from happening so frequently?
  1. Better user training based on root cause analysis
  • help users understand how they prevent laser cutter failures
  1. Proportional funding based on usage
  • right now the laser cutter maintenance budget comes out of general membership revenue
  • if root cause analysis shows that general wear and tear is causing the failures, then that should be accounted for in usage fees
  • the model for this could take a number of forms:
    • all members getting a free number of minutes
    • overage fees for long usage/production runs

tl;dr:

  • Laser cutter needs a lot of work
  • a tiny group of people is throwing a lot of volunteer hours at it
  • this should change to avoid volunteer burnout

Thanks for reading, and feel free to bikeshed away in the thread.

2 Likes
2

Is there a way to display laser activity by username? I think having that info be public to the membership in Grafana would help us all be more personally accountable for the laser.

note: I’m not sure if that is technically possible with nomos etc.

3

I’m on the LCC, but am speaking for myself - we didn’t discuss any of this separately.

As a related note, we have added a few new faces to the LCC recently, which is helping us keep up!

Back a few years ago I had supported (and introduced a QGM motion that did not pass!) usage based funding. My views have changed over time, after being involved with spaces in Toronto that were very heavy on that model

There it seemed to lead to less of the good kind of experimentation and familiarization of people with the tools - and an even more insider/outsider thing with when it had maintenence needs, as fewer people became knowledgeable.

When you’re paying specifically for time on a tool, I think it’s pretty natural to begrudge “gah, this broken thing ruined my piece! - now I’m out not only the material, but time because of your bad maintenance” and I don’t know how to avoid that.

My personal dream would be for us to have more of a gradual spectrum between “has never touched a laser cutter” and “capable of stripping it down and rebuilding from component parts”, where we could gradually up-skill people. Unfortunately, that work itself would require quite an investment of time - “laser cutter 201: care and feeding of the cutter” would be neat, but is really hard to scale.

I don’t know how much of the recent spike in incidents with the cutter are down to build quality of our machine, vs. how much might be related to lack of care. I hope people appreciate that it really does matter! Some may also be related to moving the cutter during the awesome painting efforts.

@Janet’s suggestion about publishing semi-anonymized usage figures is a very interesting one to me. We do gather data on how much the laser is used (both “logged into” and “laser actually firing”) but don’t currently do it in a way that exposes who it’s attributed to - it’s only correlated if the LCC needs to figure out who was operating it when something was broken. It would not be terribly hard to update this.

Would a “leader board” style display of laser usage be something folks would be open to? It would also help us identify who would be the most obvious candidates to train on further laser operations and maintenance. I’m aware there are privacy concerns, and we don’t want to motivate people not to use an awesome tool, but to balance the use.

4 Likes
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i agree with jons point of tiered training levels. that was sort of my thinking about getting training for alligning mirrors. just more of us that could resolve smaller issues as they arrise would mean less down time.

1 Like
5

I really like this tiered training suggestion also and would be down for it. I realize the Laser is a sensitive tool that does require management by the LCC but stuff like laser alignment or basic troubleshooting training could spread the load out to the membership. As always thanks to everyone on the LCC for keeping us cutting.

6

A good read for people interested in stats, too:

https://talk.vanhack.ca/t/scheduling-laser-cutter-usage/8351?u=jarrett

And https://isthelaserbusy.com/

2 Likes
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FYI I use automotive anitfreeze (glycol based) as coolant in my laser, I haven’t changed it in a long time, it doesn’t gunk up.

I also have a fish tank chiller that I’m planning to use as a cooler. (in case you want to build a more robust cooling system).

2 Likes
8

I did a leaderboard last December, just before I took the laser down for the move.

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