Off to the 3D printers!
I finished the prototype enclosure last night (er, this morning) and got it sent off to a 3D printing service. In my admittedly utopian mind, this should’ve been as simple as uploading my SketchUp file and hitting a big “Materialize Now” button, but, alas, things weren’t quite so simple. I tried 3 different services, and here are some thoughts on each:
Ponoko - I really want to like Ponoko, but the service failed on me pretty spectacularly. First issue I ran into was that they only take one object per file, while my model had two separate components in one file (the base and lid). But when I split up the two parts into separate files and uploaded them, Ponoko inexplicably complained that my models were too big, even though the dimensions fit within the maximum sizes described in their documentation. The documentation also referred to a step where you select the units the model is in, but I was never presented with such an option in the upload process…
i.materialise had by far the easiest flow. I didn’t even have to register to upload my model, and unlike the other services, they accept SketchUp (.skp) files directly without any conversion. The model showed up exactly as expected, and they even have a simple 3D viewer that works without Java. I would’ve just gone ahead and had them print my enclosure if they weren’t so expensive. The printing (with the cheapest plastic material) would’ve cost about $75, and with shipping, the total cost would’ve been over $100 — too rich for this bootstrapper!
Shapeways seemed to have the best price, but the upload process was far from smooth. Unlike i.materialise, they don’t accept .skp files so I had to export to Collada (.dae). Shapeways seemed to import the .dae file fine, except it shifted my two objects apart so that the total “volume” (they just take the extreme spread in x,y,z dimensions, rather than the actual amount of material required) was about double what it should’ve been. And since the price goes by volume, the quote was also far higher than it should’ve been. After much trial and error and frustration (and a few hours of sleep in between), I resorted to downloading MeshLab to convert the .dae in to a .stl. Shapeways finally imported the model correctly (after one more correction where I had to tell them to use inches instead of millimeters), and gave me a more acceptable price with free shipping!
My prototype enclosure should show up from Shapeways in a couple of weeks. I hope it all works out (knock on plastic)!
