Big fan of Cadquery! I used it to generate circuit board enclosures in an old project of mine[1]. Once you have it set up it is much nicer to use than Openscad and you have the ability to export STEP files, which is pretty huge. I haven't played with it in a while but the new improvements look great. The maintainers are also very welcoming/helpful to newcomers. Overall a great open source project.
Yeah fair enough. You can get SLA parts electroplated, although it will still be more matte than glossy unless they are polished, which would increase the price, and it would probably be cheaper to just do the brass casting option at that point.
Also- one of my coworkers recently got a custom wedding band and he went through a similar process to the one you went through of looking at vendors, trying to find the right material, etc. He wanted a pretty customized ring, and one of the things he added was the embossed outline of a lake that had special significance to him. Not sure how many people would have similar requests, but it would be cool to allow something similar. Maybe just have the option to upload a black and white picture and use that to create an embossed feature.
Hey Jack, nice work! I love the idea, this is an area where customization is very valuable and automated customization like this can save a lot of time and headache.
What are you using to generate your geometry? Any plans on doing other jewelry types? One thing I could also imagine people wanting is delivery of SLA-printed prototype rings to get a better idea of the look and feel.
Thanks! I don't think that CAD tools will ever go away, but I also think there is plenty of room for purpose-built tools that abstract away some of the CAD know-how needed to make simple things.
For the side wall mounting holes it is pretty simple, it just looks for the outline of the PCBA you are making an enclosure for, and then makes sets of holes spaced evenly, offset from the outline. I'm planning on making that a lot more customizable as well as have smarter defaults. Right now the hole placement does not take into account things like cutouts for connectors, which can be important.
The PCBA mounting holes are created based on the positions of drill holes in the IDF file, compared to a given hole size threshold that the user sets.
This is a website I made for generating simple prototype enclosures for circuit boards. In a previous job I often had to make a lot of simple prototype enclosures for different projects, and I felt like the process should be a little more automated, so I built this.
The site is still in a pretty early stage (in other words the duct tape and gum holding it together may fall apart at any moment), but check it out and let me know what you think!
[1] https://enclosuregenerator.com/