One of the engineering hurdles for the OpenPCR project is the case and industrial design. I’ve been looking into ponoko.com over the past couple weeks, and am finally ready to give it a shot.
Google Sketchup is amazing for quickly diagramming your design in 3D. To get ponoko to laser cut the shapes, you’ll need to export the shapes to svg. The tricky part is when you try to add “teeth” to the edges of your design — for us, this is important because we want the case to be easily assembled and sturdy. The open source tool for this, called InkScape, is a total time sink (can you get Illustrator?). That said, as a beginner to ponoko I had my fair share of hair pulling frustrations — your design needs to pass through their uploader and I ran into many many many little issues being new to all the tools involved. Last Sunday I spent 5 hours putting together a simple cube, with the goal of getting a simple price quote from ponoko.
To that end, I worked for 5 hours on Sunday night using Sketchup and Illustrator to pull together a more accurate case for our OpenPCR machine. I shot it over to ponoko and we’ll see how it goes.
For the first edition, I’ve decided to go with bamboo as the base material, which ponoko has ~1/4″ sheets of. Let’s see more tools for biotech made from biology!