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Fabbing boards: Why does it matter where you live? As for cheap, try sharing a panel: https://oshpark.com 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. |