Comments(3)

Comment by Paul Campbell at 10:18 am on 16 November 2007

wow up with the big boys (or girls, I’ve vaguely known Ada/Limor for years - girls can do anything! she’s a bit of an icon these days) - the whole DIY making stuff (http://www.makezine.com/blog/) world is hopping these days - in Silicon Valley open work shops of various kinds are popping up (for example: http://techshop.ws/
http://www.thecrucible.org/) are popping up - places with tools that one couldn’t normally, training to use them, afford are available in a shared space for people to walk in off the street and use - the last couple of years has been kind of an explosion of people doing cool stuff all over.

Ponoko’s a great idea (I’ve pointed a bunch of my SF artist friends who are commuting to the TechShop at them) - in some sense it’s not new I’ve been using similar services for printed circuit board prototype manufacture for maybe 10 years (upload your design to the company, drop them a credit card, boards arrive 3 days later) - but there’s all these other great new programmable tools available like the ones that Ponoko are using that smart people want to use (when are you going to provide fabber service guys? 2D gets boring fast :-)

Things are changing in other parts of the biz too - 20 years ago when I moved to the US people built stuff in their garages (I designed hardware that got me a downpayment on my house) - then it sort of stopped happening as the barrier to doing products involved doing your own silicon - that’s changing as FPGA type devices are getting fast enough and dense enough to do interesting things with - the little proto board I bought last year comes with a rom image that loads a CPU into the sea-of-gates, boots linux and runs a web server ….





Comment by max at 11:16 am on 16 November 2007

I make my own things in the garage too using basic tools and drawing right on the wood/ply or on paper with a pencil. A CAD or any vector-based tool to design that shelf is too much for me. The complexity of doing it using a computer counts most of DIY people out. Who’s left then?





Comment by Paul Campbell at 12:19 pm on 16 November 2007

well there’s sort of two groups here being catered to by this world:

the small company/person/whatever who wants to make stuff that’s beyond what they can afford - I want to proto something in plastic but can’t afford the mold NRE - I can get some fabber time and make just one or two (the company I work for actually used to own an early fabber to make TV remotes for user useability testing) - Ponoko are providing that service in flat stuff

Then there’s someone like you who likes to make stuff - there’s a couple of things going on here - you can learn the tech (and when it becomes common the CAD tools will become easier to use - the PCB vendors I worked with in the past gave away CAD tools - fab services like Ponoko may be in that biz themselves eventually) - but more importantly someone else who’s a little keener can design something cool, throw the design up at the fab service and you can use it (maybe with a fee back to them) - it might be a whole item like a kitset desk - or it might be components (shelving parts for example) you order the stuff you want (5 of this, 6 of that, 9 of those but 4cm longer etc) - there’s no inventory (just bits), the fab service makes them on demand - you don’t have to interact with a CAD program more like an inventory system





Name:(required) Email address (required, will not be published): URL (optional): Comment:

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail