Great turnout for the Get Your Stuff Made presentation! Ian talked about the ways open source is currently manufactured, and outlined the package we send to Seeed Studio to start a new project.
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Great turnout for the Get Your Stuff Made presentation! Ian talked about the ways open source is currently manufactured, and outlined the package we send to Seeed Studio to start a new project.
fantastic slides, wish i was there! maybe in NY?
Ian is like a RockStar :P
Great presentation and was great to meet you afterwards1
You too!
It was a great talk, and was awesome meeting you and Skot!
Thanks for coming by! It was nice to see you too.
Hopefully you’ll have a video of the presentation and discussion available on-line because slides are simply outlines.
Sorry, sound is always an issue and this time was no different. Our recording sounded illegible. Maybe Make put it online though. Maybe I can do it from the workshop studio too, along with the FAQ presentation.
I’m going to end my todays rant round here. I’m sorry in advance, not bad intetions… only good ones.
Anyway. I thought today about this presentation and more I thought more it looked me as half bakery. You promote how to get your stuff made, but you do not get your stuff made. Only a damn PCB.
Do you know any normal person who wants to buy a damn PCB***? I do not know any. They want to buy a product! Product comes with enclosure! Normal customer does not fancy about bare PCBs laying aroung on the desk, normal customer does not want to build a custom enclosure.
Even when that person happens to be an electronic engineer. PCB goes into enclosure and people want to have an enclosure for their PCB’s. That is the reason why they build one when it is missing.
I hope that I made my point clear that far.
Now what I want to have. I want a enclosure for Dangerous Prototypes products. I know it is hard to produce one or even find an existing standard solution. That is the reason why you should have one. As option.
It might be recommended to design the PCBs so that the future versions could use the old version enclosure.
It may even make sense to have one fits all enclosure for all the boards. But probably it is complicated because there are always holes needed in it and those are alway different.
I do not know what works best for you, this is your desition. I just want my enclosure.
*** I’m excluding PC parts from here because there exist standard solution for this without much hassle.
Best!
Thanks Kris, I appreciate your candid feedback. We’re working on this, and have reshaped everything into a standard PCB size to help with casing. For existing projects, check shapeways.com, there’s a ton of user-created cases you can order online for most of our stuff.
Beyond that though, many people besides us (SparkFun, Adafruit, etc) have done brisk business selling boards only.
@Ian
Yes, indeed, selling boards only is probably a good business and maybe you have investigated this already and desided that having an enclosure is a bad business for you. That can be the case.
DIfference I see between mentioned and you is that they also sell mostly half products that buyers integrate into their own projects some way but you are selling (mostly) something that is already an end product.
Anyway, I do not want to waste your time arguing here and I really appreciate that you shared your knowledge with us.
PS. Simple search on Shapeways by “dangerous prototypes” or “pirate bus” did not find anything. Not problem of yours but you but it might be interesting for you.
I think you’re right most people expect electronics to come in a case, and also should be well-tested and polished and probably should even have a user manual. My understanding is that Dangerous Prototypes specifically caters to customers who are not normal people :-)
I like PCBs :)
I would rather see DP (and the rest of the open hardware makers) focus on innovative prototypes that can be hacked by other makers than to focus on the polish (and other stuff) that comes along with producing finished goods. But selling cases that happen to fit the prototypes would be great too.