As many of you know, I am a longtime Carvewright user and have done many and varied projects with it. I like the machine and Designer software. However, there are some firmware and software bugs that really should be addressed.

You probably have your own "favorite" bugs that you'd like to see fixed, but the big one for me is the occasional instability of Designer Pro. There are times when I get errors of various types when starting the software that cause a crash, and the only remedy to get any work done is to reboot my computer. The Open with Preview function has never worked for me. I get No preview Available or a runtime error and crash. There are various workarounds that have been suggested, but to my way of thinking these are excuses. Software should not crash because of too many patterns or whatever.

By way of background, I have spend my entire professional career in the firmware business, both firmware development and test and verification, in Fortune 500 companies. So I have some experience. Software should never fail because of input conditions. If code is going to fail because of too many this or that, then at minimum that input condition should be checked and handled by exception routines. I developed firmware for disk drives, and I can say with confidence a very large percentage of that firmware is handling exception conditions. Best-in-class firmware developers employ a technique called Failure Modes & Effects Analysis (FMEA), a structured methodology to uncover potential failure modes and properly deal with them. At minimum, if a developer experiences a runtime error, it is never ignored; it is always traced to root cause and addressed. It is not acceptable to understand or guess what lead up to the error, then leave it to the user to avoid that condition.

I cannot think of an application that I use other than Designer that has resulted in a runtime error or crash, and I have been thinking hard.

A pesky firmware bug for me is that the machine occasionally and randomly "forgets" user inputs. I have set user options to never ask to stay under rollers and other options to save time. These are sometimes "forgotten" and the prompts return. OK, annoying, but not critical perhaps - or perhaps it is. Let me explain.

One of the options is to set X calibration. Mine is off a bit from the factory setting, so I have adjusted for it. Yesterday I ran the first 48" board of a two-board wide project. Today as I started to machine the second board, the default prompts came back. I checked X calibration, and sure enough the setting had reverted to factory default. So now the dilemma: did the X calibration get lost before or after I ran the board yesterday? If yesterday's board ran without calibration, the carving will be a bit longer than designed, but would not be a problem, IF I also run the second board without calibration. In that case I should leave calibration alone for now. If, however, the X calibration just got lost, and yesterday's board ran WITH calibration, then I need to readjust calibration today. With this large of a pattern on the board, if I don't guess correctly, I'm liable to trash $35 in lumber and 5 hours machine time.

(So yes, a workaround, I should check X calibration value before starting a big project, IF I remember and IF calibration cannot be lost while a project is running. I'd much rather have a fix.)

I'll let you know how my project turns out in a couple of hours.

Designer software and firmware is quite good in my opinion - it could be great if some of these bugs were properly addressed.