GENOMICON

Or more accurately, visited for the first time.

Because I’m such a tight-wad I actually dropped in, in person rather than pay the $19 postage… off down to Wellington went I, and into the Ponoko offices.

They’re the sort of people you just instantly like. Lovely people. I will do anything I can to help them, even if the postage is a bit of a killer.

So anyway, got the package, that is so beautifully assembled I couldn’t bring myself to open it for several days… but did, and here it all is:

Golden Mean Callipers! Marvellous.

I wonder if they’d consider re-using my offcuts rather than charging me for an extra bit next time. Or if they’d consider reusing my envelope – which is (apparently) what is costing the $19 within NZ. This could be a good opportunity for the open-source re-usable packaging thing that the Open-Manufacturing lot sometimes go on about.

Apparently Ponoko also do a sort of “subscription” service where you pay $22USD a month and they halve making and posting costs… and really, I’m not sure that running a business from Ponoko would be viable without this.

In their forums they also talk about setting “nodes” up in other continents – which is pretty crucial in my opinion. Any EU takers?

A nice progression of an alien’s gradual descent to the physical plane here:

Pretty cool… an amazing amount of work though. I think total automation of all this might still be quite a way off.

These are quite cool… a guy’s got his own laser-printer and used it to make lots of little boxy, lighty, connectory things.

For this level of experimentation you kindof need you own cutter I think – it would be amazingly expensive to do all this with Ponoko.

From Jared @ Flickr

Well that went quite well I think.

Attempting to make a set of Golden-Mean Calipers a bit like this:

Which seems reasonable enough etc. So.

1) Need to learn how to use Inkscape. No worries, lots of tutorials etc, and I needed to get away from software that won’t run on linux in any case. Inkscape does. It doesn’t save as gif or jpg though, which means I can’t use it for what I need to use it for 99% of the time.

2) Get my head around Ponoko’s colouring conventions… ok, a few questions there – so I went to the forums and got replies within 24 hours or so. Looks like they’ve got someone replying to forum messages once a day.

3) Upload the thing, see how we go.

Now, I did have a bit of a grumble on the forums about how you can’t actually tell how much it’s going to cost before you go through a long drawn out process. As they need to calculate the cutting time, I thought… ok, maybe fair enough.

To cut a bit of a long story short though, here’s a couple of charges here:

NB: If you are considering using this design… please don’t. Someone has complained that this design is too close to theirs… and besides, this design has a couple of flaws – that have been fixed in a better design, here.

Design 1

Design 2

If you do decide you want to buy some of these (they are the most elegant design I think, and there has been a fair bit of trialling and erroring done… my designs here are different from the holyholo ones in that they’re a bit weak) – please visit this site – www.holyholo.com

The orange bit is the box that they supply to make sure you fit everything in the available space – this one is the smallest possible space etc – 18×18 cm. The drawings are blue so the laser knows where to cut. Black is for engraving etc. You shrink your lines down to .03 of a mm, which means they’re so light you can hardly see them. You get used to it etc.

Costs:

All in US dollars.

There are a load of different materials, but I want these to be brass so I made a plastic one for prototyping, and a brass one just to check the costs… which means 60 US$ for a 18×18 square of brass. When you buy a bit, you buy the whole piece then throw the offcuts away. They don’t recycle.

The “making” cost is the time the laser beam sits on the page… which is pretty linear by the looks – and quite possibly, a completely arbitrary number. I wonder what it’s based on. Electricity use?

Anyway, if I cram as many of these things in as I can, it comes to about 5… which means comes to 27 US$ each… which is about $50NZ each, which is about double what you could retail them for I think.

Okay… proceed to checkout… add 2% sales tax because I’m in NZ… the postage…

… $10… what? NZ? No… it’s $19 NZ.

Right. Ok. That’s seriously taking the piss isn’t it? I’ve read people from overseas bitching about the postage costs in the forums. You can buy calipers – proper big steel ones with an LCD read out on trademe (which is a bit like ebay) and the postage is $5.90.

So there you go.

Nice idea, but my bet is if the model works, then Ponoko are going to be completely blind-sided by a US/EU operation that does the same thing, but who recycles their offcuts and who don’t take the piss with postage.

Then in about 3-5 years, laser cutters are going to become cheap enough that your local print shop (or something) will have them, knocking out the postage costs altogether.

An interesting talk on fab-labbing from Neil Gershenfeld here:

Hot on the heels (give or take a year) of this Wired article about a Surge of Nerds Rebuilding Afghanistan. HeyBryan has put together comparison lists of the equipment in these labs… and the idea that they can be put together for $40,000 seems incredible to me, but there it is.

An interesting video of the process required for making 3D prints of World of Warcraft characters.

Very labour intensive, and very hands-on. Still, early days yet etc.