[Gta04-owner] 3D-Printed Cases

[Manuel Dejonghe]

Hello,
I wanted to respond to this topic, already discussed in "[Gta04-owner]
Complete GTA04 phones" quite a while ago, so I prefer making a new
topic out of this. I may quote some of the mails from the other thread
if I want to pick up a topic.

For starters: I calculated what it would cost to print the parts on a
professional 3D-Printer (Dimension Elite,
http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/3dprinter). After a little tweaking (turning
of objects) I was able to arrange all parts on one buildplate (which
makes it much easier to build one entire set). It turned out that it
would take around 5 to 6 hours per build and sum up to a little bit
more than 35 cc of material and little more than 30 cc of support
material, makes 70cc, at a price of 30 cents per cc, this would boil
down to around 20 euro. This is a price for private, non commercial
use available at the fablab in Aachen
(http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/fablab). For professional/commercial
applications, the fablab takes "market usual prices" at around 90
cents per cc currently. Still, would be 60 Euros ...
This is probably what can be achieved also with those internet-based
services. Shapeways allowed upload and calculates a full set with
shipping to 70$ // 52Euro, but this is with the cheapest material they
have, called "White Strong&Flexible" which has some sandy appearance.

Now to the procedure: The support material is another plastic this
very professional 3D-Printer fills in at places needed to build things
like bridges. It is later then rinsed out with a leach. This allowes
practically *any* object or structure to be build from STL, even if
the original part was designed for mould injection and also things
that would not have been possible by mould injection. This machine
above has a very high reproducability and resolution and the snap-in
mechanisms for the front and backplate to hold together are very
likely to work as designed. Available are ABS and PLA.


Now the much cheaper (and more widely available) possibility would be
the DIY 3D-Printing from the range of personal fabrication devices
like Makerbot Cupcake CNC, Thing-O-Matic, UP!, Shapercube, RepMan,
Ultimaker, RepRap, Mendel, Prusa Mendel etc. I happen to have one of
the latter, and we just held a workshop (the second) here in Aachen
where 10 of these were build in a weekend, that's why I am a bit
versed in it. These devices are available or DIY-buildable at a
fraction of cost (400-1000 Euros) compared to those professional
devices and can produce objects of impressive quality. I guess we are
reaching more than 80% of the quality with much less than 20% of the
cost. Plus, the raw material costs around 35 Euro per kg, I'll let you
imagine how many cases can be built with a kilogram of that !

The downside is that mostly these home fabrication devices do
currently not yet have the possibility to print two materials at the
same time, neither a support material. Also, the resolution is not
quite the same. Currently, I am printing with a layer height of 0,29
mm which is already quite some achievement, but this is only one of so
many parameters that have an effect of the effective resolution,
precision and reproducability.

Some of the parts could be printed right away (the ones that have one
side that is flat and even, so it can be printed from this side
downwards), some would need change (if it has spikes in every
direction, like the buttons) but then most likely would not match to
the other parts anymore. Also, some of the very fine details would not
come through. What I want to do is to print those feasible parts on my
printer and show/send around. What I also can do is change the other
parts so that they are printable and maybe still follow their
function, but I can't (yet) see whether they would fit or not. If that
is perceived as a possible way to go, I'd be happy to invest more time
and maybe sending me a broken GTA02 could really make some sense then.
>From here to there: So much to do, so little time :)

My guess is that a new case can be designed that would fit to the
current electronics and be an actual case at the same time.

ciao, Manuel