101–110 of 216 posts
I was very interested until I saw this blog post: http://glowforge.com/our-new-advisor-jennifer-lawton/ If you have been following the whole Makerbot Industries (and then Stratasys) debacle, seeing the name of Jennifer Lawton might give you pause. I think I'm going to sit this one out.
Someone please connect this with a Microsoft Kinect and build a robot turret on treads for eliminating pests such as mosquitos.
I have a 40W hobbyist laser cutter. It's fun, and a great tool for various projects, like making board games[1,2]. That said, sometimes materials inside the machine catch fire, and sometimes the beam reflects or dwells on a section of the metal enclosure. It's interesting that they've chosen to make the entire (?) enclosure out of plastic, itself a combustible material. I get why they went with plastic (cheaper to fa…
Wow - Great way of generating Carcassone tiles. Thanks for posting. (Runs off to hackspace with files in hand)
This was helpful because beyond the laser power settings, it took some fiddling to get the right shades of gray for cutting depths that worked with the multilayer plywood I was using (some layers are darker than others; had to make it look good). The files can also of course be colored for printing.
The different regions are segmented by their colors in the original files, which were created via Inkscape with outline vector lines over bitmap fill images. The lines were drawn by hand by my girlfriend and I using Inkscape, based on a purchased copy of Carcassonne we have. The images were made by rendering the outline SVGs to PNGs, filling in regions using GIMP, then reimporting them into Inkscape, and overlaying the vector outlines.
For meeple, she laboriously cut them out by hand from Sculpey clay. A cookie cutter would have been ideal but it took her less time to cut the figures than for me to bend copper flashing into the shape of a person or to devise a way to extrude the figures.
Also, in case that URL goes down, here is a link to the tile generator on GitHub pages:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worst part is that if I try to buy something like this in Brazil, it'll probably get apprehended by customs as a dangerous item.
If there are no importers/dealers in Brazil, this is a business opportunity to import machines from China.
There are lots of customs fees involved that are not considered taxes per-se. But let's ignore them and look at taxes:
You get a 60% import tax right off the bat (this applies over the product cost, the aforementioned fees AND shipping). Then, there's ICMS, which varies by state (let's say, 12%). There's also IPI, which is variable according to the product and I'm not sure where a laser cutter would fit in. Also PIS (1.65%), COFINS (7.6%) and IOF since it probably involves currency exchange (0.38%).
Speaking of that... there's the unfavorable exchange rate. Today, the real hit a high of BRL 4.23 for one USD. It was 2.50 something one year ago, and then the economy blew up.
I'm not going to the trouble of trying to calculate the final price, without the importer's markup, but it will be HIGH. Good luck marketing this thing to anything other than medium businesses. And that one year from now. You'll spend like an year incorporating your company and navigating the customs law mess.
There are other options, of course. Manufacturing locally would bypass a lot of taxes (and generate others). But then you could negotiate deals with local authorities in exchange for job creation and some strategic dinners. That sort of stuff. The opportunity cost of doing that is just huge and, by the time you managed all that, you'd be profitable in several other countries already.
Then you'll have to deal with the crappy transportation infrastructure. Forget shipping things by train, you'll have to use trucks. Delivery estimates of 30 business days are not uncommon at all.
My advice? Stay away from Brazil. Even more so this year. There's a reason investors are pulling money out of the country.
Disclaimer: I'm Brazilian.
I am surprised it can cut paper without causing ignition. I wonder how many of the projects shown were created using the "basic" ($2K) version and how many were produced using the pro ($4K) version? I will say their early bird prices make these compelling for small business/etsy setups. However once they go to full price, I don't know if that will remain as true. It would take a LOT of wallets to break even at a $4K…
That said, it's always a good idea to keep an eye on the machine while it's running.
For instance, when Steam was first released Valve promised that should the authentication servers go down, they would ensure that the games would stay functional without them. This was an important point that contributed to its success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there are no importers/dealers in Brazil, this is a business opportunity to import machines from China.
It's Brazil... This would be a nightmare to make happen, you would need to bribe so many people to get a shipment here that your profit would be unworthy and also make you a criminal or you can run it by the lawn and never get the items or pay 100% taxes over them + their shipping costs making a machine like this cost U$5000,00
Could you use this for single sided PCB printing?
In theory this process should work (it still requires etching as you can't cut copper with this laser): http://www.instructables.com/id/Custom-PCB-Prototyping-using...