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Comment by cscotta | Hacker News Reader

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months.

It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects.

The frontend is powered by Interface (http://www.getinterface.com), with the backend order fulfillment / manufacturing infrastructure built in Rails running on top of Ruby 1.9 and Unicorn, all sitting behind Nginx. All asset processing on the backend is done using GraphicsMagick using a modded mini_magick, which is way faster and more efficient than ImageMagick.

We'd love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and criticisms!

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I'd be interested in hearing more about how you went from idea to production, finding a manufacturer, etc. I think this is a big stumbling point for a lot of people in the same position as you were — interested in manufacturing a physical product, but only familiar with the web.

Seconded. A few years back for a school project I had designed and digitally modeled a chess set in 3D. After showing the renders to people, some folks claimed they'd buy an actual physical version. I pursued it for a bit, but all the places I emailed required orders too large for me to afford, or made the one-off prohibitively expensive on a per-set basis. It would be interesting to hear more about how you folks pursued this.

One of the more interesting aspects of the site was image processing. Since the print process requires high-res images, we have to deal with fairly large images (anywhere from 5-20mb). Using image caching from Interface and a custom nginx module, we sped up image resizing and caching considerably for this site.

Love it. Awesome idea and prior to seeing this I hadn't even considered getting a case for my iPhone.

Very cool, great work.

Is there a picture of a real case in someone's hand? I want to see what they actually look like, but all I see are shiny renderings.

They look really good though.

Of course! Sorry for all the renders; they look nice, but it's good to see the real thing.

Here are some of the cases coming off the line now: http://u.phoreo.com/pa.JPG

And here is a hand shot (the original art was a bit messy; the printing is correct): http://u.phoreo.com/en.JPG

Could you add a couple from multiple angles (including front)? It's not clear to me what the whole case looks like.

Do you have an affiliates program?

Cool, so they kinda snap onto the back. How thick are the cases?

I really like the site, however, I would like to give this as a gift to someone and you don't seem to have a build in gift card interface. I know it's not that long till X-Mas, but it seems like a great tech gift for a reasonable price the only problem is the cool part is letting them pic the picture.

Nice site! Cool to see you can grab an independent artist's design, or upload your own!

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