6 steps to produce your first hardware batch in a fablab
A french version of this article is also available.
We’re now able to code physical objects, I mean writing a bunch of instructions able to transform raw materials in… whatever you want!
As developers and designers, we are stuck in front of our laptop most of the day. Even though there is something unique about crafting digital medias that can spread all around the world, doing something that can be touched is an overwhelming experience.
The scope of this post, is to show how easy it is to actually produce objects thanks to these new shared places called fablabs. Fablabs are basically places where you can rent all sort of numerically controlled machines such as laser cutters and 3D printers.
Artists and designers are already accustomed to these machines because most of the schools are now equipped, but once they start their first job it is difficult for small companies to own such machines. Luckily, the trend to finance shared places dedicated to makers offers just what is needed to create.
Getting started
Find your fablab as close as possible from where you work or live. The main reason for this is that machining is tiring, air extraction is making quite a lot of ambient noise. Thus, it is more productive to come and leave as much as needed, at least at the beginning when you’ll have to experience a quite frequent try and error loop. Stay at the office and think calmly about your design and rent the machine you need for one hour to print, assemble and see what needs some fixing.
As we work in the city center of Bordeaux, we went to Cap Sciences new awesome fablab called 127° degrés. It takes us 10 minutes by bike to go there.
Once you enrolled, you’ll just need two hours of training on each machine before you feel like a maker and then a simple shared calendar will enable you to book the machine.
Take the time. It took me 5 days over 3 weeks to go from my problem, which was designing and producing stylish casings for our 6element sensor to the current solution :
I speak about “the current solution” because I’m not completely satisfied about this design. For once, I don’t feel bad about it. This process makes it easy to make a design evolve constantly.
Trial and error, is the key. You should begin with some existing drawings and test them on various materials. Before going for our 5 mm plywood, we tested some other materials (mainly different kinds of plexiglass and other woods in thickness varying from 3 mm to 1 cm).
It is also a good idea to explore a lot of different laser parameters. The neatness of your cuts will be depending on the laser speed, the frequency and the power. Each material has its own optimal parameters.
If you know how to code, I’d strongly advise to generate your design programatically. The reason for that is that it will help you to create by incrementing a code base.
All my code can be found on this github repository, and you can see that I started by a code that could generate a simple box with inspiration for MakerCase and Boxmaker.
Then I decided to style the box with borders that had a special shape (more on that just underneath).
The good thing here is that each time you use the laser cutter, you can associate it the original code and file. This way you can move on, without the fear of breaking things.
Get mad. Once you master the basics, you can have fun and cut whatever shape you like. Since our sensor detects electromagnetic waves, I wanted to style the sides of the box with the field lines solution of these Maxwell equations as if the center of the box was a solenoid. Following the recommendations of a good source, this code solves these:
Producing a batch takes often more time than what you could expect. Engraving is very long so try to limit this task and while cutting can be very fast, you should often check the state of the machine (air flow, dirt on the lens etc) and do some maintenance. It took me one day to cut 21 units.
The price for the wood for one box is around 1€ and renting the machine is 20€/hour, so the global cost is around 9€ each.
In brief, even if you have no precise idea, just listen to the maker inside you. Take your bike and ride to the closest fablab. If your fabmanager is as cool as Clément from CapSciences, it won’t be long before you find ideas. Creating something physical is overwhelming and gives the oportunity to make people touch what you create.
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