My experience with Ponoko (part 1 Digital)
Ponoko produces cut materials for you of whatever design you can imagine that can be made from thin and flat pieces. You design in a vector-based drawing program (ie. Illustrator), upload it to Ponoko, choose a material (basic woods and plastics), and they cut out your design with a frikkin laser. Then they mail you the pieces and you hope it fits together.
Most examples so far on their site are junky plastic necklaces, but there are a few clever lamps and a laptop stand. Laptop stand! Good idea.
First I made some sketches on paper - nothing fancy:
(I kind of liked the elephant idea)
Then I took some measurements of my laptop (Dell Inspiron 9300), downloaded Inkscape, an open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator, and started working it out.
An early attempt:
Still elephanty at this point. Once I got the rulers, grids, and snapping working correctly in Inkscape, it wasn’t too difficult. The hardest part is imagining how it’s all going to fit together. A decision I made along the way was not have the design require any separate fastening or glue, which means all the components need to fit snugly and securely.
Before uploading to Ponoko, your design needs to be in EPS format. Here’s the final design:
It took about a week (evenings) of trial and error to complete.
I am currently waiting for Ponoko to cut my design and send it to me. I chose the .6mm Italian Poplar for the material. Hopefully I didn’t overlook any catastrophic design flaws and blow 70 bucks.
(Rate it!)
Loading ...Movie: Grave Robbers! (brainstorm)
This idea is about a year old - found while scouring old notebooks for gems. It’s an idea-association for a story about 2 buddies that decide a great way to make money is by stealing long-forgotten jewelry and other junk from caskets. I was unemployed at the time and it did seem like a pretty good idea. But, I wasn’t totally confident that this was the best idea, so I set out to discover other possibilities for a story (involving cemeteries and loot). My favorite part is the branch of crazy ideas that ends with ‘animal operated bakery’. Sometimes, this is like Found! Magazine, but it’s just my own stuff.
(Rate it!) Loading ...Process Documentary: Where Tires Come From
An animated documentary film following the entire process of manufacturing an automobile tire - beginning with the raw materials and calculating every bit of energy used along the way.
This sketch focuses on the oil used (and exaust/pollutants) during different steps in the process. A real map of energy and waste produced for a tire would be vastly more complicated. For example: what about all of the oil used for electricity and fuel to manufacture each of the machines used along the way? And the energy used in making the macines that made the machines?
(Rate it!) Loading ...