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Hi all, I made this! Neat to have my dream of being on the front page of HN come to fruition. To use HN parlance, one might say that I have launched! (Any VCs

by memset 15y ago

Hi all, I made this! Neat to have my dream of being on the front page of HN come to fruition. To use HN parlance, one might say that I have launched! (Any VCs out there want to discuss other ideas I'm working on?) This kit look me about 6 months to put together, from prototyping the PCB to iterating over an enclosure design. Waiting for components to arrive in the mail (PCBs, laser-cut designs, resistors) was what took the most amount of time. When I started, I was fully convinced that I would have a working product within just one or two iterations. Putting together a polished hardware kit (and I'd say that this has some degree of "polish" to it, though far from perfect) is much more difficult and time-consuming than I would have ever imagined. Quite different from the agile! lean! iterate! that we talk about in software-land. Oh. So I have 4 or 5 PCBs from the first few iterations. If you end up ordering one (and I encourage you to do so!) then send me an email and I can throw one in the box. You know, as a collector's item. If you have any questions or anything, do let me know. Be on the lookout for a post describing some numbers behind this traffic spike.

coderdude 15y ago
I think the SVG box generator script that you wrote is a neat by-product of your production. https://github.com/poundifdef/SVG-Box-Generator https://github.com/poundifdef/SVG-Box-Generator
- memset 15y ago
  If you're interested, there are two things I've been meaning to update about this script (I promise I will merge your pull request!) 1. The measurements do not take the laser's kerf into account. That is to say, it does not account for the thickness of material burned away by the laser, so the resulting faces are a bit loose. 2. If you look at the design, the tabs (where the faces fit into each other) go straight across. It would be better if the tabs were smaller, and then have several of them fit together across the length of the box, rather than one long tab.

by memset 15y ago

coderdude 15y ago

I think the SVG box generator script that you wrote is a neat by-product of your production. https://github.com/poundifdef/SVG-Box-Generator https://github.com/poundifdef/SVG-Box-Generator

memset 15y ago
If you're interested, there are two things I've been meaning to update about this script (I promise I will merge your pull request!) 1. The measurements do not take the laser's kerf into account. That is to say, it does not account for the thickness of material burned away by the laser, so the resulting faces are a bit loose. 2. If you look at the design, the tabs (where the faces fit into each other) go straight across. It would be better if the tabs were smaller, and then have several of them fit together across the length of the box, rather than one long tab.