design for manfacturing

3 Articles

An Alternative Orientation For 3D Printed Enclosures

February 2, 2024 by 29 Comments

When it comes to 3D printing, the orientation of your print can have a significant impact on strength, aesthetics, and functionality or ease of printing. The folks at Slant 3D have found that printing enclosures at a 45° provides an excellent balance of these properties, with some added advantages for high volume printing. The trick is to prevent the part from falling over when balance on a edge, but in the video after the break [Gabe Bentz]  demonstrate Slant 3D’s solution of minimalist custom supports.

The traditional vertical or horizontal orientations come with drawbacks like excessive post-processing and weak layer alignment. Printing at 45° reduces waste and strengthens the end product by aligning the layer lines in a way that resists splitting across common stress points. When scaling up production, this orientation comes with the added advantage of minimal bed contact area, allowing the printer to auto-eject the part by pushing it off the bed with print head.

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Lessons In Mass Production From An Atari Punk Console

November 16, 2023 by 7 Comments

Sometimes the most interesting part of a project isn’t the widget itself, but what it teaches you about the manufacturing process. The story of the manufacturing scale-up of this Atari Punk Console and the lessons learned along the way is a perfect example of this.

Now, don’t get us wrong — we love Atari Punk Consoles. Anything with a couple of 555s that bleeps and bloops is OK in our books. But as [Adam Gulyas] tells the tale, the point of this project was less about the circuit than about the process of making a small batch of something. The APC was low-hanging fruit in that regard, and after a quick round of breadboarding to decide on component values, it was off to production. [Adam] was shooting for 20 units, each in a nice enclosure and a classy package. PCB assemblies were ordered, as were off-the-shelf plastic enclosures, which ended up needing a lot of tweaking. [Adam] designed custom labels for the cases, itself a fraught job; glossy label stock and button bezels apparently don’t mix.

After slogging through the assembly process, boxing the units for shipping was the next job. [Adam] sourced jewelry boxes just a bit bigger than the finished APCs, and rather than settle for tissue paper or packing peanuts, designed an insert to hold the units snugly. That involved a lot of trial and error and a little bit of origami-fu, and the results are pretty nice. His cost per unit came out to just a hair over $20 Canadian, including the packaging, which is actually pretty remarkable for such a short production run.

[Adam] includes a list of improvements for larger-scale runs, including ordering assembled PCBs, outsourcing the printing processes, and getting custom boxes made so no insert is needed. Any way you cut it, this production run came out great and teaches us all some important lessons.

Why Starting A Kickstarter Could Kick Your Butt

October 19, 2015 by 59 Comments

So you’ve come up with a great idea and now you’re thinking about starting a crowdfunding campaign – and why not, all the cool kids are doing it. Now, let’s say you already have a working prototype, or maybe you even built a small run for friends online. You’ve made 10 here, or 20 there. Sure it took some time, but making 1000, or 10,000 would be so much easier once you get all the orders in, right? Wrong.

Before you even think of setting up something like a Kickstarter, we would like to invite you to have a seat and watch this series of videos covering the things many people don’t know about manufacturing. It’s going to cost you 7 hours of sofa time, but if you’re serious about getting something to production these seven hours will pay in spades. Dragon Innovation has had many notable clients over the years – Pebble, Sphero, Makerbot, to name a few. They help startups find their way through the manufacturing mine-feild, for a fee of course. The founders are former iRobot employees, and have quite a bit of hard fought, yet free knowledge to share.

You’ll learn about how important decisions early on can make huge impacts on the success or failure of a product. There’s quite a bit of raw technical info on injection molding, design for manufacture, testing, pricing and everything under the sun. So do yourself (and everyone else) a favor, and before you click submit on that Kickstarter campaign, sit back and enjoy this free seminar.

We’re really enjoying the manufacturing oriented videos which have been popping up. Just a couple of weeks ago we came across a pair of hardware talks from [Bunnie Huang] that were a pleasure to watch. At 20 minutes this might be a good primer before you take the plunge with the playlist below.

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