Yes, it is. Coming up with simple and cheap tricks to solve a problem is what makes engineers great. I used drip irrigation hose for this job before. But come to think of it, that stuff cost about $4 for 100ft at the hardware store. I bet Rich's straw solution costs less per 100ft. Dang, I have wasted money...
This reminds me of the old Drake shortwave receivers. Some had hardly more parts in them than grampa's tube radio but the performance was tremendously better.
Yes, else you get too many returns or 'warranty' claims. It's not just people. Then there is the new puppy dog that has the unquenchable urge to sink its teeth into anything that resembles a toy.
That would be ok if board and Lexan panel would snap into place without screws and the back of the box had a battery compartment with a sliding lid. When I looked at the standard program of the major box manufacturers I could not find anything like that. Just the usual (and expensive) project boxes.
Units like the one I am thinking about don't need to be repairable. So the snap-in action may well be irreversible.
for work and was very pleased. Roughly 3"x11" rectangle with 16 holes about 1" in diameter, laser cut into hardwood with steel rules for about $100, in about a week after I emailed them an Autocad drawing. This is to punch foam rubber but it should work on thin acrylic or petg or ABS or ... Call them; they were very helpful on the phone. Oh, if you send them the material they will even do the punching for you if you don't happen to have a press :-). That was $2.50 a piece for 50 pieces, and I'm sure that would get better with more volume but that was all the gaskets I needed for now and I was really tired of hand punching them :-).
Punching is always cheaper than drilling, even one hole at a time.
-- Regards, Carl Ijames carl.ijames at verizon.net
Thanks! That seem to be a good place to get started. I like their flame logo on the home page. $2.50 a pop would blow the budget, even half that would. But maybe this can be done somewhere on an automated press, especially since precision isn't such a big concern for this job.
But I wouldn't discard drilling. Considering how cheap that is on circuit boards there has got to be a way. Worst case one could have PCBs made with no traces on there, just the holes, if that is cheaper.
Your welcome. I know $2.50 is too much for you, but that was for 50 pieces and punching isn't their real business, diemaking is. I let them do the punching for the convenience. A local rubber company does punching for us on other stuff for about 1/2 that, on much larger gaskets, so I'm sure you could get it well under $1 with much less than your 10K per year (make the die big enough to do 4-8 lids at a time, for starters, whatever the press will stand). Now that I have the die I'm going to our local company for the next run. We also do some boxes with LED displays where the LEDs are on a PC board behind a hole in a metal box, with a stick on label on the outside. The label has solid color regions, all the lettering, and clear windows over the LEDs. We punch holes for switches to stick through. Sounds great, but, in 100's for a
4"x8" label they are several dollars each which kills your budget. We are okay with it because we want the rugged box and the quantity is so low the cost would be about the same no matter how we made them. Anyway, just a long-winded way of saying that a label is also going to be expensive. Maybe punch a panel and then silk-screen it? That is pretty cheap to do, and easy to set up so long as you only want one color. I've been reading up on building a vacuum forming machine for fun - really doesn't seem too hard and it would be neat to form your own boxes :-). Form the box, punch the lid from sheet, silkscreen it, and glue it on since you don't plan on repairs anyway. Hire some cheap labor and do them yourself until the volume takes off and you can afford to go offshore. Then start offering semi-custom boxes for other people who have the same needs as you do now :-).
-- Regards, Carl Ijames carl.ijames at verizon.net
Probably not as much as you think - they still all have to be cut to length by somebody, or by an automatic machine that somebody would have to invent and set up. :-)
And black irrigation tube would be a lot more opaque than a straw. :-)
One of my buddies in high school had an old player piano at his house, and all of the little rubber tubes were cracked and falling apart, so we replaced them all with plastic aquarium hose - it was also fun cutting 88x 1.5" tubes to reconnect the read head to the manifold. :-)
It was also fascinating working with the centering mech - there was a cat whisker at either edge, connected to proportional vacuum valves, that turned a motor that physically moved the whole carriage (as needed) to keep the roll centered on the head.
Maybe you should check with Guy Macon's group. ;-P
--
Cheers!
Rich
------
"There was a young man from Dundee
Who buggered an ape in a tree.
The results were quite horrid:
All ass and no forehead,
Three balls and a purple goatee."
I've used a about 6" long rod to bring the light from a LED on the PCB out to where it can be seen. It works quite well. The rod just has to line up with the LED when the unit is assembled. It doesn't bring ESD into the PCB.
I've recently used these electrical junction boxes for an electronic project:
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This was for devices that will be left out in the rain and chained around street posts for days at a time, and must survive casual attempts at deliberate destruction, such as being jumped on by neighbourhood kids etc.
I fitted a short PVC pipe in the input port (as a handle to attach the chain to) and drilled the lid for an IButton socket and LED. They come with a variety of port options. The inside is just the right size to make a 2xAAA battery holder a tight fit in the base, leaving plenty of height for a circuit board.
Price was $AU4 each for 30, pretty good, about half the price of the cheapest low-volume pricing on Jiffy boxes and the like. You'd get a much better price in volume from Clipsal. Their molds are all made by CNC I suspect, at least they provide full 3D CAD drawings, so for a sufficient volume could perhaps turn a special, such as a version with no ports.
Good advice, though I think I'd try to make 500 for $7500.
In any case, you don't want a product like that that only sells 500 per year. If it fails in the marketplace, forget it. If it succeeds, go buy the proper tooling. Consider it "forward pricing" or a marketing experiment.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it\'s the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
This would make identification of the lit LED tricky from a distance and for people with slightly impaired vision (folks won't always have their glasses on while using it).
I did think about a larger version of a bar graph row. But then I realized that these kind of fell from grace in the audio gear world and became expensive. There it's mostly LCD now. I could go LCD but that is totally cost prohibitive unless you are doing a million units a year.
Ah, the old days. I remember repairing telex machines in the 70s. These were rugged but when something broke on an old Lorenz we often could not get a spare without paying some exorbitant price. So we had to re-invent things. Lots of fun.
Then we bought a very old and neglected piano. Pre-Edison, so it had 'candle illumination'. Everything was wood, leather and cloth. That was also a fun restoration project. Afterwards it truly sounded like one of those uprights in the old saloons.
Sounds familiar. I priced out translucent labels 15 years ago and still remember that sticker shock. We then used the silk screening route.
I strongly believe there is a market and that many products never come to fruition because the enclosure costs are breaking the deal. So there should be a healthy market. I really don't know why box mfgs don't offer boxes with some standard size holes in them for switches, potmeters, LEDs. Then they could offer plugs for those holes that you don't want and it should be the often cited win-win situation.
I have scoured our hardware stores for anything that might be useful since electrical boxes are very cheap in the US. At least those blue plastic ones which you can buy in bulk as a 'contractor pack'. But there wasn't anything suitable. Another option would be to look in the toy department of stores like Walmart for something suitable, still have to do that.
Probably will but PCB costs are quite low. It definitely must be no more than two-layer, maybe even single layer.
Usually consumer goods show the way here. There they attempt to squeeze out every last penny. I was a bit surprised when I opened a modern TV set and found that the main board was a rather thin phenolic. Same for some smaller hand-held gear.
And, I think it's not unethical to put up a website with a very prominent, "***COMING SOON!!!***" kind of thing, with your description and prelim specs and stuff like that. And welcome inquiries, and all that, of course.
Of course, it'll be a little hard to show any pictures, since you haven't got a box yet. ;-P
Nope. One can always design a circuit board so they line up with whatever the enclosure demands. It's probably what we are going to do if we can strike a deal with a company that uses a suitable enclosure for something totally different.
Well, I guess you haven't yet lived through a venture capital start-up phase. It's rough out here. Neither you nor I make such decisions, the guys with the Armani suits do.
These tester didn't look too appealing except one. But how do you know I didn't buy and rip stuff? I have ripped numerous parts that are used by rock bands and found some that might work. Some less than $10, BTW. Plus toys, plus...
Now go and tell that to the VC. There is a whole lot more than those $10k involved. Right off the bat you can't even test market stuff without a slew of agency approvals. And, you know, that costs. Since you live in Europe you should know how bad bureaucratic hurdles for start-ups can be. WEEE and things like that.
"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:wxZnf.40021$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr11.news.prodigy.com...
That's a daft idea. The holes would always be in the wrong place, or even worse, slightly misplaced. The plugs would cost 2 cents which you find too expensive.
Products come to fruition because some companies have the guts to get on with it.
If you plan to make a 10k-20k/year of these boxes, you should at least have the guts to buy 1000 cases at *whatever* it costs to see if your product flies. You are *making* it an impossible project, because you want to make profit on the first box.
Did you buy a few of those cable testers? No, of course not. You're not even prepared to buy them, rip them apart, to 'massage' your own creativity, and to see what happens, to see if it sprouts other ideas. You only see elephants that crush your boxes, you only see 9V batteries that you don't like, warranty claims, stickers that were too expensive, and what have you.
Make 1000 boxes for $15 a piece, and sell them for $5. You can save a buck if you drill them yourself, using a steel template/rig, if that makes you sleep better. The $10.000 loss on the first batch is just an investment.
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Thanks, Frank.
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The original question I posted was for a low cost type molded enclosure. There were some excellent replies and have found a few possibly viable solutions. Working on it right now.
With investors you have to be up front not just about the solutions but also about obstacles. It gives you a lot of credibility. I don't do this for the first time. Chances are, at the next meeting one or more of them will be quite smart and ask about such an obstacle. One has got to have a good answer. Or as the scouts say, be prepared.
Believe it or not but the toughest business questions I fielded during prior finance group or board room discussions hardly came from people with an engineering or MBA background. They came from physicians and attorneys. I kind of liked that and ended up developing the closest relationships with those who had prodded me with the more difficult questions.
If we can make it for the target price it will fly. Like other stuff before that.
Setting up a web site should be done once you can actually ship finished goods and not before. I know that even some semiconductor companies see that differently and put products up there that they didn't yet have but their credibility has taken a nosedive because of that. I think we all know who those are.
"Joerg" schreef in bericht news:jg0of.33695$q%. snipped-for-privacy@newssvr12.news.prodigy.com...
Well, if someone else makes the decisions for you, why post the question?
Sure, go and tell the VC. Of course there are other costs, but if you continue to think in obstacles rather than solutions or oppertunities, this thing is never going to fly. Tell that to the VC as well.
Okay, make 500 then, as Speff suggested. The $7500 materials investment allows you to *give* them away, instead of selling them for $5. Why isn't that website up and running, with the product information and registration form for a free product sample? You have to spend money to make money, not the other way around. That includes wasting money.
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Thanks, Frank.
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