The browser-based Easel software is friendly, easy-to-use, and powerful enough for most things. But it being an online service means that it’s vulnerable to outages. We’re in the leadup to a number of holiday craft fairs and just discovered that we can’t run any carves because Easel itself is currently offline.
If we had the gcode already downloaded, we could run the machine with a gcode sender, but there’s no way for us to change designs for custom engraving (which is a lot of what we do.)
A local-only version of Easel (with updates, of course) would eliminate that problem and allow us to run carves even when the service (or the internet) is broken. Being cached on a slightly older version in those cases wouldn’t be a big deal.
Even better, it would allow us to build a “mobile carving station” which we could run at craft fairs without internet access, and do custom ornaments in realtime!
Thanks for the consideration,
James