{"id":433,"date":"2011-10-12T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T04:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=433"},"modified":"2011-10-12T00:01:58","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T04:01:58","slug":"digital-fabrication-ponoko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/digital-fabrication-ponoko\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Fabrication:  Ponoko"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following up on my work on <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2011\/09\/21\/408\/\">digital fabrication and related areas<\/a>, I tried <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ponoko.com\/\">Ponoko&#8217;s<\/a> fabrication service. \u00a0I didn&#8217;t design anything myself (I&#8217;m lazy), but I bought a tabbed Arduino enclosure from their marketplace, cut from 3mm clear acrylic.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the 20cm x 20cm laser-cut sheet I got from them:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IMG_03081.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-434\" title=\"IMG_0308\" src=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IMG_03081-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The cut width was very fine (Ponoko says the line width is about 0.2mm):<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IMG_03121.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-435\" title=\"IMG_0312\" src=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IMG_03121-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And here&#8217;s the final case (not glued, and assembled not entirely correctly):<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IMG_03151.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-436\" title=\"IMG_0315\" src=\"http:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/IMG_03151-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Not bad for $5! \u00a0I&#8217;m impressed.<\/p>\n<p>I think they&#8217;re definitely onto something, but there&#8217;s still more work to be done. \u00a0In particular:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The parts took too long to arrive: 19 days.<\/strong> \u00a0In a world where you get stuff from Amazon in 1-2 days, this is <em>way<\/em> too long. \u00a0It took four days to start making my part, 8 days to make and ship it, the 5 days for delivery. \u00a0Digital fabrication really sings when you can iterate quickly on mechanical designs (like software does). \u00a0At some point, someone will do fabrication overnight and offer &#8220;<em>designs submitted by 5pm will ship the next day<\/em>&#8220;, with East and West coast fabrication centers and cheap 1-2 day shipping to most of the US.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>For 2d\/sheet goods, support CAD formats.<\/strong> \u00a0Ponoko supports EPS and SVG formats &#8212; they&#8217;re probably targeting hobbyists and artists. \u00a0 For\u00a0mechanical\u00a0design, they need to support DXF and other CAD formats. \u00a0And, they should consider the cut line width with offsets, so they can offer &#8220;<em>cut to specified dimension<\/em>&#8220;, which will make it easier to fabricate mechanical parts (such as tabbed enclosures). \u00a0Finally, please don&#8217;t make me lay out my parts in a fixed format sheet. \u00a0Ponoko should optimize the sheet layout (across orders) and just cut out my parts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following up on my work on digital fabrication and related areas, I tried Ponoko&#8217;s fabrication service. \u00a0I didn&#8217;t design anything myself (I&#8217;m lazy), but I bought a tabbed Arduino enclosure from their marketplace, cut from 3mm clear acrylic. Here&#8217;s the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/digital-fabrication-ponoko\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}