Build Your Robot Online

An anonymous reader writes "Ever needed a custom part for a robot, case mod or hardware hack but lacked the tools or a machineshop to make one for you? Ever needed a custom circuit board? Well, PC Magazine's Bill Machrone writes about a few websites, Emachineshop and Pad2Pad, where you use their free software to design, price, and order anything you can design with the software. This is more useful to slashdotters than 3D 'printing' technologies like rapid prototyping since you get real working parts. It looks like they support a number of machines and fabrication techniques beyond traditional machining, like plastic injection molding and waterjet. As Machrone says, this is empowering stuff. This is something that should ignite a creative spark to all you hardware tinkerers out there in Slashdot land."

Comments

My girl robot.

[Anonymous Coward]

/nerdy laugh

Great news!

[Alcimedes]

Man, there have been a number of times that I've been trying to build something, and ended up with the hacked HomeDepot route.

It involves going to said Mega Store, browse through their crappy selection (3 items, but 200 of each) and then beating the snot out of it back at your house to try and make it do what you want.

I really hope that this technology stays in the hands of people who love to build and tinker, and doesn't just end up the "Next big thing" for some retail chain. I have a feeling it would wipe out the variabilty like it has in everything else they touch.

Re:Great news!

[JABoyce]

I have used emachineshop on a few occasions. Mostly for machined aluminum parts for a motorcycle. Its a great service. Easy to design and order. I am surprised /.ers didnt come across this a long time ago.

Well maybe its my fault, I found them about a year a go, and didnt tell anyone here

Sorry :-{

A good use for the net

[techno-vampire]

There must be tens of thousands of people out there trying to build some home-brew device needing custom designed parts. Most of them can design them (or get them designed) but few have the resources to get them made. Something like this will give them the chance to make their ideas and dreams come true. I wonder how many inventors have failed simply because they could neither buy or build the one thing they needed to get their idea to work. Only time will tell, of course, but I'd bet this will be a great help to people who's imagination goes further than their skills can follow.

Re:A good use for the net

[HeyLaughingBoy]

but few have the resources to get them made.

No, not really. Or at least, maybe I don't understand what you mean by "resources." Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, there are usually local machine shops that can build most things you'd want as long as you can pay for it.

For custom PCBs, there are dozens, if not hundreds of shops that take files emailed/FTPd and will product your custom board for under $100. In fact, this is one benefit to overseas outsourcing: one of the most popular and hobbyist-friendly outfits is Olimex in Hungary (I think) that I've heard is insanely cheap and has 1 week turnaround. They take Visa/MC

For metal/plastic stuff, just go to your local machine shop/metal fab outfit. As long as you can make legible drawings, most people are within a few miles of a shop that can do this work. Just check the Yellow Pages!

The real benefit of places like eMachineShop is that they provide tools that directly interface with their workflow, so they can give you rapid quotes and since they're online, it makes it easier to compare prices. For 10 years or so, smaller PCB outfits have had the free Easytrax PCB layout program available for download from their site with instruction on how to send them the output data.

Quite a benefit, I agree, but often local shops may be better. I once designed a mounting plate for an 8,000 lb winch for my offroading truck and it was a great help to be able to take the drawings and have the shop foreman look them over and offer suggestions for improvement. This was also a fairly chunky bit of steel (40 lbs or so!) that I wouldn't have wanted to pay to ship.

Intriguing idea...

[FirstTimeCaller]

Well it's still a bit pricy (eMachineShop) -- figure $50 to $100 for a simple one off part. But it certainly is an interesting idea.

They claim that their software and service is accessible for neophyte 3D designers. I certainly fit into that category. As soon as I get some spare time [flips through calandar...], well someday, I'll download the software and play around with it. It costs nothing to experiment and get a price quote.

Same with the circuit board design site. I've got a couple of designs that I've wanted to put together some boards for. If nothing else the thought of free schematic design software is appealing.

I can't help but think that this is the future of jump starting small businesses...

Re:Intriguing idea...

[realdpk]

Their pricing drops dramatically for more parts. It's not much more expensive to get them in quantities >100.

The software is buggy, however. Crashes whenever I try to do file->open. I can't seem to figure out how to create objects, either, heh.

What I want is something like this, but with the Rhino interface. eMachineShop is supposed to be able to import a "universal format" (dxf I think?) that Rhino can write, but as stated before, file->open doesn't work so I can't test it.

Pricing

[nacturation]

Can someone more familiar with machining comment on their samples prices? It seems a little expensive for the pieces they list. I can imagine something much more intricate would cost a small fortune. Granted, the prices go down with quantity but most hobbiests aren't going to order 100+ pieces of a part.

Re:Pricing

[ColdWetDog]

As a hobbyist machinist, I think the prices are about right. Certainly for some easy stampings, anyone with a half decent shop could turn out the design pretty quickly and much cheaper. For a machined or lasered part, you're talking about multiple man hours for even the simplest design.

Their multiple item prices are pretty reasonable. Remember - these aren't production items or prices - they're R&D. I imagine that aside from the occasional well heeled hobbyist, small companies who need to prototype something rapidly and relatively cheaply would have a field day with this service.

That said, if they were to drop thier prices to where the "mass" of hobbyist robotics fans / modelers / Star Trek freaks could just play with creating fun things, they could get awfully busy.

Re:Pricing

[LesPaul75]

It's interesting that for three out of four of their "sample parts," the price for ordering ten is basically the same as the price for ordering one. I mean, it's like $65 versus $80. I guess it makes sense... Doing the initial setup is probably the expensive part. Just stamping out nine more of the same thing doesn't require much more than the cost of the material.

Re:Pricing

[thpdg]

These prices are inline. The company I work for has a machine shop, and you see that even the simplest parts take time to make. When the guy doing the work is making $15 an hour, or more, it adds up quick.
We started ordering out for some parts from local machine shops, and the prices are about the same as these.
Even with my existing resources, I'm sure I'll take advantage of these 2 sites.

Re:Pricing

[qwasty]

First off, I am a machinist.

There are several other companies that do exactly what emachineshop.com does, and you can probably find them listed somewhere at Modern Machine Shop.

I prefer to either buy Chinese, or work with a small local shop that can cater to my needs. The small local shop will probably be very expensive though. A part that costs $200 from emachineshop or similar, could (but not always) cost double that from a smaller local shop.

Machine shop rates in the USA have been around $60 to $90 per hour since about the 1970's...and no, that's not adjusted for inflation. What that means is that the costs for getting things made have dropped off quite a lot in the USA, due to CNC machines and their automation abilities, as well as deeply declining wages for skilled machinists - Yep, you guessed it, if you were making $10/hour as a machinist in 1970, you're STILL making $10/hour in 2004. On top of that, compared to the 1970's, the taxes and cost of living are higher too.

A one-off part that might cost you $200 in the USA could probably be had for maybe $30 from China. The reasons for this aren't simple...You can't say Americans are lazy, or the Chinese are smarter, or anything like that. My opinion is that the USA is terribly inefficient, and it's economy is being pissed away in one way or another by the goverment, and it's poor policies, all the way down to the individual level. The result is that, despite our technical know-how and hard-working tradition, the USA isn't very competitive with other nations. We have high taxes, high unemployment, low standards of living relative to our wealth, and lots of well-paid lawyers. As far as I know, despite our amazing potential and ability, America isn't a clear world leader in anything anymore, except military might (which is fading too).

For a real world example, in one area that I used to work, there were 3 machine shops. One of them had been in it's location since the 1950's and was competitive in it's pricing, and consequently, was doing quite well. One of their contracts was for making Petzl Carabiners. The second machine shop dealt heavily with government contracts, and was paid top-dollar for even simple work, and had no fear of competition. The third machine shop was only about 5 years old, privately owned, and it struggled to survive continuously. It was the last new machine shop left in the area, as all the others were already out of business.

The second machine shop, with it's steady diet of government contracts is not terribly interesting, since it's obvious why it's a success. So, I'll just tell you why the Old Shop was doing well, and the New Shop was not. Basically, the city where they were located had enacted some building regulations several years ago that required all of the buildings to be "pretty". Meaning, landscaping, fancy brick, etc, etc. So, the Old Shop was basically just a corrugated steel warehouse, that despite it's size, only cost about $20,000, and was paid-for decades ago (I asked the owner, that's what he told me). The New Shop did similar work, but it was in a fancy brick building, with city-imposed landscaping, etc.. That building cost over $100,000, and was maybe half to 3/4 the size of the Old Shop across the street. On top of this, since the property that the New Shop rested on was so pretty, it had a higher value than the industrial-looking property that the Old Shop rested on, so the New Shop had to pay substantially higher property taxes.

I made some custom medical test equipment in the New Shop, and part of the order was for some little clamps that were to be used to pull on bandages to test the strength of the adhesive. The parts were simple, but we charged the customer about $1600 for each clamp. The really sad thing is that no one bothered to tell the customer that they could do the same thing with an off the shelf clamp from home depot that cost $4.

What what what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used emachineshop on a few occasions. ... I found them about a year a go

January 8, 2004 eMachineShop today announced the pre-opening of their new online service

Recommended reading

[fiannaFailMan]

See also: Robot Builder's Bonanza. Lists where you can actually get your hands on stuff.

ExpressPCB

[Darth Yoshi]

Since we're discussing PCB companies, I'll mention ExpressPCB. They not only have a free PCB design program, but also a free schematic design program.

Windows only, deal with it.

Re:ExpressPCB

[wass]

You beat me to the punch, I was just about to post the same thing.

I've used ExpressPCB (at the advice of my brother) and not been disappointed. They're pretty cheap, and the product is pretty nice. I used them to build a simple two-layer board (without solder mask), and it was IIRC only $80 for two. Pretty cheap, especially considering the time and annoyance it would have taken me to hack something together with perfboard or wet copper-clad etching instead. And it looks professional too.

For simple projects, for $51 you can get 3 two-layer boards (as long as they're a specific size). That's a hard price to beat.

I've seen their ads in electroncis mags for a few years now, and it always seemed kind of shady to me for some reason. But I was pleasantly surprised.

Re:ExpressPCB

[tzanger]

Alberta Printed Circuits has been doing this for probably close to a decade now. Great boards, great prices, fast turnaround. You can use whatever PCB layout program you want (I was using OrCAD and Eagle) and like I said... they just work.

I, Reboot

[Anonymous Coward]

Courtesy of the Windows operating system.

Emachineshop has a neat little CAD program

[Animats]

EMachineshop offers a neat little CAD program. What's unusual is that it knows what their shop can manufacture, and enforces design rules. It also prices the job automatically. Unlike most machine shops, EMachineshop does sheet metal work, with CNC punching and bending. Try it out. Design a sheet metal box.

EMachineshop still has substantial setup costs, but the production costs aren't too bad. Price quantity 1 and quantity 10, and see what you get.

Another useful resource is Front Panel Express, which makes flat panels with holes and lettering.

Re:Emachineshop has a neat little CAD program

[martingunnarsson]

For the lazy ones...

Clickable.

My Robot will have...

[Anonymous Coward]

Intelligence
Sense of humor
Social skills
Similar interests
Kindness and generosity
Compatible belief system
Good looks
Earning potential

oh, and big knockers.

Fear factor

[Peter777]

For people like me, who have lots of great ideas (you'll just have to trust me on that one), but no training in how to make them a reality and somewhat of a phobia about going out and dealing with real people, this could be a really great thing, like wheelchair ramps or tin openers that're easy to use (the latter is still to be invented methinks). The accessibility of this system could potentially cause a huge increase in innovation as people who previously were intimidated and/or didn't know where to begin can now see how everything works and deal with it in a straight-forward format. It may be similar to the explosion of low-medium income individuals actively involved in share trading since that system was simplified by the internet and the costs pushed down. It might hurt the more technologically backwards machine-shops, but it'll take a long time for established businesses to move their custom elsewhere, so everyone will have time to adapt to the new competitive topography. That said, if any do go under, they probably weren't worth keeping (please don't flame me if you work in or own a struggling machine shop). I wonder if I could design and order a custom machine shop, then start my own online machine shop business.

Open-source Hardware

[cgreuter]

Y'know, this sort of thing is perfect for open-source hardware projects.

Typically, if a group wants to develop a Cool New Machine, they can do the actual R&D online with CAD software and possibly build a few prototypes. However, once the design is actually done, there's nowhere else to go with it unless they can convince some hardware manufacture that it'll sell enough to justify a production run.

But now, they just need to convert the design to whatever format Pad2Pad uses and put it up for download. Anyone who wants one just needs to send in a copy and a credit card number and they're done.

This could lead to some interesting new hardware.

About Pad2Pad...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) industry, and I've looked at the Pad2pad website before. The problem with them is this - they give you software to create a board in, but it only outputs in their proprietary format. That means your design can only be fabricated by pad2pad, not by anyone else. So, once you've designed in their software, you are locked into ordering boards from them. You cannot order them anywhere else unless you re-design it in another software package.

There are older DOS freeware PCB layout packages called easytrax and autotrax available from Protel , as well as a free 30 day demo of their latest. There is also a Linux PCB layout package available. These packages output gerber data, which is the industry standard data format for circuit boards. It is also an open format (rumor has it /. people like that sort of thing). This means that you can send your design to any PCB shop in the world, and they can read it as easily as you can work with a *.bmp.

You can even send your gerber data to pad2pad, and they can make your board from that, though they would prefer if you used their software. After all, if you don't, you'll be able to get the boards make somewhere else if you don't like their service.

And that would be so unfashionable - doncha know proprietary lock-in is all the rage these days?

A different approach

[synaptic]

I've been reading about how to build a Gingery Charcoal/Gas Foundary and homemade metal-cutting lathe. Today I finally ordered the books from Amazon.

"All you need is an old metal, 5-gallon pail, about $6 worth of fireclay, some sand, a junk auto heater fan with a coffee can shroud (or a vacuum cleaner), and this book to build a high temperature furnace."

You can use it to melt aluminum, zinc, and bronze which you can then pour/cast into sand molds. The nice thing is that you can assemble the lathe accurate to .001" or greater without needed precision parts, and learn a ton in the process.

Once you've done that, you can cast any other parts you want and machine them to your specifications for far cheaper than using this service. If you didn't make the part quite right, no worries, melt it down and recast it.

I'm planning to build this to machine parts of hobby sterling and steam engines and the ability to construct precision prototypes whenever I have an idea about something. No more tin cans, balsa wood, and RTV sealant! Yay.

Lots of other people have websites chronicling their projects based on these books.

great tool for researchers

[menem]

I think this will be a great tool for researchers at universities and companies. No longer will you have to contact the hardware group, beg and plead, and wait forever just to make a simple prototype. Instead, just send a simple an online order, and they will deliver the prototype to your doorstep.

Circuit boards at home?

[northstarlarry]

What's difficult about doing circuit boards at home? I've made a couple.

You can buy "blank" boards, covered completely in copper on one side. I did the design in Illustrator, printed it out on a laser printer, and transferred the laser ink to the copper. The ink works as a good resist for the ferric chloride etching solution, which is also cheap and easy to buy.

Then you get a shallow dish that you're not planning on using again (some old tupperware, e.g.), and swish the board around until the extra copper's gone. A 100-watt lamp keeps the ferric warm and makes everything go a little faster.

The etching doesn't take more than half an hour, and the projects I've built have worked well.

Re:Circuit boards at home?

[FrostedWheat]

I tried making my own a few years back, but I didn't have a printer back then. I used a special pen instead and although the circuit worked, it looked like a work of Picasso. I've stuck with using veroboard since then.

How did you transfer the image to the board? Most of the methods I've seen involve printing the circuit on a transparent sheet and overlaying that on the board - then exposing the whole thing to UV light before putting it in the etching fluid.

The transparent sheets are rather expensive, not to mention the UV lamp. So if there's an easier and cheaper way I might give it a try again!

Ph34r my l33t Honda Civic!

[LesPaul75]

Imagine the new level of car mods that will be possible! Their material list includes carbon fiber, right?!?!

How about out-of-print auto parts?

[Atario]

I have a Daweoo and getting parts for it is sometimes not easy. I wonder if they could machine a replacement brake shoe or fender for me? (I have grave doubts I could supply them with the specs, though...)

Re:Do these HW companies want to be SW companies?

[nacturation]

They are giving the software away anyway, so why don't they go open source?

And invite all their competitors to come in and turn it into a price war, thereby inviting a ton of new competitors who undercut them because they didn't have to go through the expense of having such an application developed for them? Please explain why any company in their right mind would do this!

Pad2Pad isn't ready for prime time

[Animats]

The advantage of Pad2Pad is that they don't just make a blank board, like all the other online board shops. They make the blank board, order the parts, place them, and solder the board. This is a huge win, because you can do surface mount jobs.

If only it were real.

I downloaded their program and tried it. Unfortunately, the list of available parts is a joke. There are only a few ICs. It's just a sample. I'd thought the idea was that you could order anything in the Digi-Key catalog, but no. You're limited to one pull-down menu of parts. They don't even have a consistent range of resistor values; there are wierd gaps.

They're expensive, too. I laid out a tiny board with two connectors and a voltage regulator. They want about $100 for the blank board, $50 extra to mount the voltage regulator.

You also need about 10-20 months labor for gingery

[darkharlequin]

they take forever to make. making the castings is not as hard as making the patterns and scraping the parts, in addition, 1800 degree aluminum radiates alot of heat T^4 and burns most anything organic. If you want to try this, find someone who already has,and see if you can borrow some of the patterns.

Laser cutting is cool

[cosyne]

One of my favorite things in grad school was the laser cutter in the mech E dept. I was happy when i found Pololu which does laser cutting for $2.50 per minute. Actually having a CAD system like this is brilliant, though.

Re:You also need about 10-20 months labor for ging

[chroma]

I'll second this. I bought this book series, and got as far as making the charcoal foundry. It's cool to be able to make my own aluminum castings, but it requires a lot of sweat and patience.

I am a robot builder

[chroma]

I build robots for competitions like BattleBots, Robot Battles, etc.

Emachineshop seems to be a bit limited in the parts they can make. I prefer to use the services of the fellow robot builders at Team Whyachi. They don't mind handling small quantities and have great prices.

You can shop locally, too.

[nameer]

If you can put together a decent drawing package for your parts, local machine shops might also bid the part - and possibly be more competitive. If you can find a small shop that is a bit slow on work, they will often pick up small jobs just to keep the machinists and machines working. It never hurts to get multiple quotes.

Re:Do these HW companies want to be SW companies?

[mollymoo]

Do these two clown companies think they are selling hardware or software? They have a great hardware idea, but why ruin it all by requiring their proprietary Windows-only "easy-to-use" software?

Yeah! Great idea! Why don't Amazon open-source their software too? Oh, wait it's because it's their fucking business. Hadn't you noticed that increasingly businesses use custom software and the sucessful ones have the best custom software? Without their software (and patents) Amazon are just another box shifter. Without this software Emachineshop is just another machine shop. Their entire fucking business model is based on rapid prototyping with their custom software. Why should they give it away?

Damn, now I've blown my mod points for this thread. All that reading of crap at -1 gone to waste. Perhaps I should have just modded you down as the troll you are.

Another PCB site

[LankyBoycie]

http://www.pcb-pool.com/ recommended by my electronic engineer colleague.