[Gta04-owner] 3D-Printed Cases

[Manuel Dejonghe]

Hi John,

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 10:05 AM, John Ogness <gta04 at ogness.net> wrote:
> Hi Manuel,
>
> On 2011-10-18, Manuel Dejonghe <manuel at dejonghe.de> wrote:
>> I calculated what it would cost to print the parts on a professional
>> 3D-Printer (Dimension Elite, http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/3dprinter)
>> [...] 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).
>
> Wow, that's quite affordable!

What could be done is that one private person (e.g. me) goes there,
let them get produced and send them around by mail. Anybody else
(preferably around Aachen, Germany) would be allowed to do that (and
hereby invited :)
I could take the money (exactly the amount + exact shipping) half and
half, maybe also by paypal (quick). One half on "ordering", the other
half+the then known exact shipping on arrival. I would do this until I
get badly fooled. This is what I can offer. Attention: I tend to be
rather unreliable for days and weeks if I'm stuck in a project at my
workplace. But this is a circumstance that I do know of in advance.

>
>> 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.
>
> Although I personally have no problems paying 20 EUR for a custom
> case, I find the idea of DIY-printing very cool. Even if the quality
> is reduced, with the low price people could really experiment on case
> designs.
>
> For example, I would love to have a case that can open and close very
> easily and also make it easy to insert and remove the GTA04
> board. This would allow me to quickly open up the case and take out
> the GTA04 board to show people (students) the various chips and
> possibly perform some hardware debugging with the board.

Those "simplifications" would be a natural side-effect from the
different design-stages.

>
> I have no experience with case designs or 3D printing, but I wanted to
> express my excitement that others are interested in this. Maybe there
> could be a place where users could post different case designs so that
> people like me can choose what kind of case I want for my GTA04.

In the area of personal fabrication, the website
http://www.thingiverse.com/ established to be a database for
user-modeled designs. Whereas the website says "Copyright MakerBot
Industries", the uploader of a "thing" has a multitude of choices for
the license:
- None (All Rights Reserved)
- Attribution - Creative Commons
- Attribution - Share Alike - Creative Commons
- Attribution - No Derivatives - Creative Commons
- Attribution - Non-Commercial - Creative Commons
- Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share Alike
- Attribution - Non-Commercial - No Derivitives
- Creative Commons - GNU GPL
- Creative Commons - LGPL
- BSD License
- Public Domain

Users can also create (derive) now things from others where
applicable. This would be the place where I would be looking for a
OpenMoko-Case, and where I would upload it, if permitted (I only got
the STL-files, don't know the *exact* license currently.

Also Google has a "3D Warehouse" connected to Google SketchUp and
Rapid Prototyping Agents like Shapeways also provide some kind of
database to the users, but I doubt they do a better service to the
open source community.


~lImbus