After they had a prototype they wanted to move forward with, they could have made an injection mold for $5k and each subsequent part would take 3 seconds and 6 cents to make, it’s shocking how tightly people will cling to 3D printing.
Bet he was already over budget and the time to research that and get it done are huge and with many risks if you are new to it.
If you accept the look (which you did if you bought it) 3D printing seems like a no brainer for this project.
What if you realize that you need to make an adjustment of that $5k mold though?
You can also cast these with polyurethane. This reminds me of those 3D printed computer mice that cost a hundred dollars. They didn't bother with polyurethane casting nor did they bother with getting a high quality 3D printer... The thing is, 3D printing is so slow that even a manual process like polyurethane casting is faster and every mold is a "3d printer" in its own right so you could be making hundreds of parts in an eight hour shift as opposed to a single one.
Looks like there were only 620 backers, and 100 of those did not back something with enclosure. So that is just 520 enclosures, which sounds much more cost-effective to 3D print them.
Yeah, that was my first thought. By now 3D printing technology has improved so much, that surely no-one would dare to let anything going to customers look like that.
Unless the goal is just to fulfil an obligation and get the hell out.
Okay but now I want one.
Yeah the article shows a prototype. The actual product:
I really can't tell if that's better. Going by the one image there (unsure if there's some thread on X that is being hidden from me), the buttons look 3D printed, there's some very weird serial number(?) or something that looks poorly 3D printed on the bottom, and we can't see the edges, so no idea if the layers are visible or not.
Yeah the lettering is terrible and oh god those buttons. Couldn't he just have bought some injection moulded ones and designed around those?
I had that 555 timer book and project kit as a kid.
TFA showed the prototypes and hid the image of the final product in the tweet
The one in the tweet doesn't look a whole lot better.