manufacturing

110 Articles

Taking A Public Transit Display From Project To Product

November 17, 2023 by 16 Comments

We’ve noticed an uptick in “project to product” stories lately, which seems like a fantastic trend to us. It means that hackers are turning out projects that really resonate with people, to the degree that taking the leap and scaling up from a one-off to a marketable product is worth the inherent risk. And luckily enough for the rest of us, we get to learn from their experiences.

The latest example of this comes to us from [Stefan Schüller], who from the sound of things only reluctantly undertook the conversion of his LED matrix public transit sign into an actual product. The original project had a lot going for it; it looked fantastic, it was technologically simple, and it provided a valuable service. But as a project, it made certain assumptions and concessions that would cause problems when in the hands of a customer. Chief among these was the physical protection of the fragile LEDs, which could easily shear off the display modules if bumped or dropped. There were also firmware issues, such as access to the backend API that serves the transit data; requiring each customer to sign up for and configure their own API key is a non-starter for a product.

In the article, [Stefan] enumerates a long list of problems that going from project to product raises, as well as how he addressed them. The API issue was solved by implementing his own service, which acts as a middleman between the official API and his customers. A nice plexiglass and sheet-metal frame serves to protect the display, too. Design changes were made as well, not only to provide better functionality but to make manufacturing easier. [Stefan] also relates a tale of woe with regard to getting the display’s app into the app stores, something that few of us have to deal with when we’re just fiddling around with something on the bench.

All in all, [Stefan] does a great job walking us through the trials and tribulations of bringing a product to market. There are similar lessons in this production run scale-up, too, but with an entirely different level of project complexity.

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.

A woman with a black vest and pink shirt with curly hair stands behind a podium in front of a projected presentation. She is speaking and has her hands moving in a vague guesture.

Supercon 2022: Carrie Sundra Discusses Manufacturing On A Shoestring Budget

October 31, 2023 by 2 Comments

Making hardware is hard. This is doubly true when you’re developing a niche hardware device that might have a total production run in the hundreds of units instead of something mass market. [Carrie Sundra] has been through the process several times, and has bestowed her wisdom on how not to screw it up.

The internet is strewn with the remains of unfulfilled crowdfunding campaigns for tantalizing devices that seemed so simple when they showed of the prototype. How does one get something from the workbench into the world without losing their life savings and reputation?

[Sundra] walks us through her process for product development that has seen several products successfully launch without an army of pitchfork-wielding fiber crafters line up at her door. One of the first concepts she stresses is that you should design your products around the mantra, “Once it leaves your shop IT SHOULD NEVER COME BACK.” If you design for user-serviceability from the beginning, you can eliminate most warranty returns and probably make it easier to manufacture your widget to boot. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: Carrie Sundra Discusses Manufacturing On A Shoestring Budget” →

A Die-Cast Car Subframe, Pushing The Limit Too Far?

September 16, 2023 by 81 Comments

A piece of manufacturing news from Tesla Motors caught our eye, that Elon Musk’s car company plans to die-cast major underbody structures — in effect the chassis — for its cars. All the ingredients beloved of the popular tech press are there, a crazy new manufacturing technology coupled with the Musk pixie dust. It’s undeniably a very cool process involving a set of huge presses and advanced 3D-printing for the sand components of the mould, but is it really the breakthrough it’s depicted as? Or has the California company simply scored another PR hit?

We produced an overview of die casting earlier in the year, and the custom sand moulding in the Tesla process sounds to us a sort of half-way house between traditional die casting and more conventional foundry moulding. I don’t doubt that the resulting large parts will be strong enough for the job as the Tesla engineers and metallurgists will have done their work to a high standard, but I’m curious as to how this process will give them the edge over a more traditional car manufacturer building a monocoque from pressed steel. The Reuters article gushes about a faster development time which is no doubt true, but since the days of Henry Ford the automakers have continuously perfected the process of making mass-market cars as cheaply as possible. Will these cast assemblies be able to compete with pressed steel when applied to much lower-margin small cars? I have my doubts.

Aside from the excessive road noise of the Tesla we had a ride in over the summer, if I had a wish list for their engineers it would include giving their cars some longevity.

Header: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0.

Automate Away The Drudgery Of CNC Manufacturing

June 25, 2023 by 39 Comments

One of the keys to making money with manufacturing is to find something that you can make a lot of. Most small manufacturers have one or two “bread and butter” items that can be cranked out in quantity, which of course has a quality all its own. The problem with that approach, though, is that it runs the risk of being boring. And what better way to avoid that than by automating your high-volume job, with something like this automated  CNC work cell?

Looks like money.

[Maher Lagha] doesn’t offer too much in the way of build details, but the video below pretty much tells the tale. The high-volume items in this case are customized wooden coasters, the kind a restaurant would buy for their bar or a business would give away as swag. The small 3-axis CNC router at the center of the work cell is the perfect choice for making these — one at a time. With no desire to be tied to the machine all day to load raw stock and unload completed coasters, [Maher] came up with automated towers that hold stacks of pallets. Each pallet, which acts as a fixture for the workpiece through multiple operations, moves from the input stack into the router’s work envelope and to the output stack using a combination of servos and pneumatics. The entire work cell is about a meter on a side and contains everything needed for all the operations, including air for the pneumatics and dust extraction.

Each coaster requires two tools to complete — one for surfacing and one for lettering — and [Maher] has two ways to tackle that. The first is to allow a stack of coasters to go through the first operation, change tools, and switch the roughed-in stock back to the input stack for the second round of machining. The other is just to build another work cell dedicated to lettering, which seems to be in progress. In fact, it looks as if there’s a third work cell in the works in [Maher]’s shop. The coaster business must be pretty good.

Continue reading “Automate Away The Drudgery Of CNC Manufacturing” →

Books You Should Read: Prototype Nation

June 7, 2023 by 24 Comments

Over the years, I’ve been curious to dig deeper into the world of the manufacturing in China. But what I’ve found is that Western anecdotes often felt surface-level, distanced, literally and figuratively from the people living there. Like many hackers in the west, the allure of low-volume custom PCBs and mechanical prototypes has me enchanted. But the appeal of these places for their low costs and quick turnarounds makes me wonder: how is this possible? So I’m left wondering: who are the people and the forces at play that, combined, make the gears turn?

Enter Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation, by Silvia Lindtner. Published in 2020, this book is the hallmark of ten years of research, five of which the author spent in Shenzhen recording field notes, conducting interviews, and participating in the startup and prototyping scene that the city offers.

This book digs deep into the forces at play, unraveling threads between politics, culture, and ripe circumstances to position China as a rising figure in global manufacturing. This book is a must-read for the manufacturing history we just lived through in the last decade and the intermingling relationship of the maker movement between the west and east.

Continue reading “Books You Should Read: Prototype Nation“ →

Compressed Air Keeps Screws Moving Through Modular Production System

April 27, 2023 by 8 Comments

If there’s an unsung hero of manufacturing, it’s the engineer who figures out how to handle huge numbers of small parts. It’s one thing to manually assemble something, picking each nut, bolt, and washer by hand. It’s another thing to build a machine that can do the same thing, but thousands of times in a row, ideally without making mistakes.

Most of us don’t need that level of automation in our processes, but when you do, it results in some interesting challenges. Take this pneumatic screw accelerator that [Christopher Helmke] designed for his modular production system. One of the custom machines in his system is a screw counter, which uses a magnetic wheel to feed screws — or nuts or washers — from a hopper, orient them correctly, and drop them into an output chute. While the counting bit worked quite well, parts would only go so far under the force of gravity in the clear vinyl tube used to connect the counter to the next process.

[Christopher]’s solution was simple but effective. His first prototype simply injects compressed air into the parts feed tube, which pushes the screws through the tubing. It works surprisingly well, propelling the parts through quite a long length of tubing, handling twisting paths easily and even working against gravity. Version 2 integrated the accelerator and a re-orienting fixture into a single part, which mates with a magazine that holds a large number of screws.

There are a lot of interesting features [Christoper] built into these simple parts that are worth keeping in mind. Our favorite is printing channels to guide small cable ties around the tubing to clamp it into the accelerator. We’ll be keeping that trick in mind.

Continue reading “Compressed Air Keeps Screws Moving Through Modular Production System” →