Goals for OpenPCR industrial design:

1. Sturdy – can be put in a backpack without fear, can be dropped from 6 inches without shattering
2. Portable – can pick up OpenPCR machine with one adult sized hand, and it will fit in a backpack.
3. Cost effective –  optimize materials cost + assembly time. ponoko is good because you can cut vents and whatever sized holes you need. This would cost hundreds of dollars from a traditional fabricator, and can’t be done by places like TAP plastic that can’t cut holes or parts <1″.

What is portability? I spent some time in the San Francisco Botanical Garden today thinking about this.

• Components such as rubber bumpers or handles technically make a device bigger and heavier, but add portability. Which would you put in your backpack, a cube with sharp metal corners or a cube with rounded rubber corners?
• Dimensions that fit in the hand are much more portable — i.e. what if your digital camera were 2x as long but 1/2 the thickness. Same “mass” from a technical perspective but the 2x long one sucks in your pocket!
• Portability means that “dirty” parts are covered during a move — i.e. which would you put in the back of your car, a broom with a cover, or a broom with no cover that gets dirt all over your seats. I say a broom with a cover is much more portable.

One of the engineering hurdles for the OpenPCR project is the case and industrial design. I’ve been looking into ponoko.com over the past couple weeks, and am finally ready to give it a shot.

Google Sketchup is amazing for quickly diagramming your design in 3D. To get ponoko to laser cut the shapes, you’ll need to export the shapes to svg. The tricky part is when you try to add “teeth” to the edges of your design — for us, this is important because we want the case to be easily assembled and sturdy. The open source tool for this, called InkScape, is a total time sink (can you get Illustrator?). That said, as a beginner to ponoko I had my fair share of hair pulling frustrations — your design needs to pass through their uploader and I ran into many many many little issues being new to all the tools involved. Last Sunday I spent 5 hours putting together a simple cube, with the goal of getting a simple price quote from ponoko.

To that end, I worked for 5 hours on Sunday night using Sketchup and Illustrator to pull together a more accurate case for our OpenPCR machine. I shot it over to ponoko and we’ll see how it goes.

For the first edition, I’ve decided to go with bamboo as the base material, which ponoko has ~1/4″ sheets of. Let’s see more tools for biotech made from biology!