And just like that, Easel is no longer recognizing my drivers…
WHY can’t you all just leave -this- version of Easel alone, leaving it as is, and moving on to Easel 2.0, so that your legacy users don’t have an effectively bricked machine or be forced to completely upgrade the computer to the latest version of Windows, etc??? This isn’t that hard to do for god’s sake.
Hi Philip,
I had the same problem, only it hit me the other day, My computer and machine would not speak to one another. I thought it was a hardware problem. I have a friend that is well versed in "Integrated Systems’ (whatever the heck that means). He remoted in and we spend a couple hours checking everything.
Long story short, he found that the newly downloaded driver did not fully embedded itself into Easel. Apparently it has to be loaded as an ‘administrator’ (again, whatever that means). He reloaded the new driver, and BANG, just like that I was up and running.
When the driver was released, it came with no instructions. I just downloaded it and thought that I was good to go.
I really think that the problem is not on the development side. I think that it is the total and complete lack of communication between those who know what they are doing, and those of us who do not. We were somehow expected to know how to load that driver as an “Administrator” for it to do what it needed to do.
After reloading the driver, my friend He asked me “you mean that they released that driver and did not provide complete instructions on loading it on your end?” to which I replied “nope” at which he said “is this a brand new company?” I’ll just leave it at that…
This goes hand-in-hand with my complaint that I’ve been shouting from the mountain tops; “Inventables MUST invest in customer training support if they wish to compete.”
Dear Inventables,
We buy the product and then are essentially on our own to figure out how to use it. If it were not for this forum, I would be COMPLETELY LOST.
I LOVE the folks on here, they have saved me time and time again. But why should it be up to the community of users to figure out how to use the product/service, and then educate others???
Inventables your competitors are running circles around you in this arena. Weekly there are training sessions for Shaper customers. The same holds true for other competitors - or so I am told (I have not participated in training of other manufacturers).
I spent a 20+ year career as an Account Executive working daily to ensure customer success, and the vacuum in this area from this company is deafening. Message to Inventables, I will tell you what I have told my team throughout my career: “If you do not take care of your customers, your competitors gladly will!”
On the tech support side; you need to hire someone (or plural) like my friend who can quickly find the problem and get it fixed. You also should hire (if possible) some of the folks from the forum (Martin, Paw Paw, Phil, Shaun, and several others) who have figured out - the hard way no doubt - how to use and manipulate Easel and the X-Carve / X-Carve Pro, and have them be your training team.
Tech Support should be just that - Tech Support. They are great folks, but they do not, and should not replace “training support” - which currently does not exist.
If you wish to capture more market-share, you MUST be better than your competition. So ask yourselves this: “Are you? Are you TRULY the BEST in this space?”
Feel free to ignore this if you believe that you are the best in your market space. But all ‘winners’ become so by NEVER settling for anything less than the BEST.
My 2-cents worth, adjusted for inflation
All my best,
Joe
PS, BTW, I had to have my friend figure out the driver issue because the Inventable Tech Support has very narrow hours of operation, and the problems are inevitably “after hours” for them - and my friend made himself available to me because he wants to see me succeed.
Meanwhile, I had a problem with my shaper trace last week. I sent a message at 9:00pm Mountain time. Three minutes later I had a reply, and within 20 minutes I was back up and running. So again, ask yourselves; “Do you believe that you are you doing all that you can do to beat your competition at this game?”
Though I 100% agree with the second part of your comment about Inventables being zero help at all (and often being the cause of my own headaches by screwing with the software, rendering it broken on my end), my problem isn’t related to the machine not talking. Everything -was- fine, running the Xcarve off a Raspberry Pi, using a custom driver.
Now that they released their “new and improved” Easel, it is no longer recognizing my driver that has worked just fine… until they mess with the software again. Other times, it has simply said the driver was out of date. Now, it says my driver is flat out not installed.
From a software side of things, their version control is absolutely absurd. There is no reason to force users to use “updated” software and refusing to allow them to use the old, solid software that worked FINE. But all that just reinforces your point in the second part of your comment. Inventables attitude is “Doesn’t work, because you aren’t using the latest and greatest operating system? Tough sh*t. Deal with it and upgrade your machine or be locked out of using the product you paid for.”
It really is infuriating and is a massive turn off for ever recommending anything from this company.
Question (and please know that I freely admit that I have no idea what I’m talking about), are you sure that the ‘driver’ problem isn’t related to your situation given the fact that they pushed out a new driver recently?
I got a pop-up last week or the week before which said that there was a new ‘driver’ that must be installed. I installed it (apparently not correctly), and then last week (I believe it was Saturday), the machine and computer simply refused to speak to one another. You know the rest of the story.
I ask because if we users were required to install a new driver, and in my case, the driver was not installed “deeply enough”, I am just curious if it is in any way related to your problem.
Again, just curious, I have no idea how these things work. I’ll an old-school woodworker trying to adapt to the demands of digital woodworking, or “an Analog man trapped in a Digital world.”
All my best,
Joe
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