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by SilentDirge
4289 days ago
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Exact opposite for me. Getting fabbed boards where I live takes forever (and is expensive) so I etch my own. Populating an SMD PCB takes forever, but, no interns for me as a small indie so I work in my basement till 3am with tweezers and a hot soldering iron. Injection molding is actually super cheap in volume -- the expensive part is the metal mold which costs an arm and a leg. Mess up a mold and, bam, your project is no longer profitable (or breaking even, if you were lucky). 3D modeling is actually easy now with packages like Sketchup. If you have the dough the pro's use Solidworks or Inventor (my fav), which abstracts the development process to 2D sketches which can then be pulled, extruded, cut etc... analogous to what you would do with your hands on paper or with clay (or legos or whatever). It's really best to have a vision and use a designer to bring it to life but when you don't have that option it's still possible to get _something_. You didn't mention it but setting up and running a crowdfunding campaign is time consuming, difficult and crazy stressful. I'm about to launch mine in a few days and am basically not sleeping. Props to Ryan -- what he has done is NOT easy and he deserves all the success he as achieved so far. |
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Parent's talking about prototyping, so injection molding ain't going to work. A good path is to test with 3D prints, iterating with cheap consumer-quality stuff until you need to test mechanical/fit more accurately, then get a shop to print your forms with a professional printer.
I've never heard of anyone going from Sketchup to injection moldable files, but I suppose that's... possible? Rhino for Mac is in free beta right now - not ideal, but easy enough to learn as far as these programs go. 3D modeling really is not that easy to get a handle on, and then doing it for manufacturable parts is another thing. Uploading your files for Protomold to auto-analyze is a good way to learn about what's manufacturable, at a really basic level (because Protomold can only make basic parts).
But physical prototyping depends on what you're making, of course. The above makes sense if you're just making a case for electronics, and it doesn't have to have any particularly interesting performance characteristics itself. If you're prototyping something flexible, for example, that's really hard to prototype with a 3D printer since the likelihood of finding a printed material close to your final is small. In that case, you may have better luck with casting silicone, etc.
For Coolest, I guess you'd want to prototype the novel user-manipulable features, but a cooler is a cooler and presumably his partners know how to make those. If he hasn't prototyped the novel features, I predict there'll be a delay if he's got a reasonable standard of quality, and at least, the final will look different from what people have seen so far.