Another lurker with only a couple posts here. I’ve had pretty much exactly the same experience as wheelgunwordslinger, actually.
Came from r/flashlight for the Q8, got a GT and some others too. Love that you guys work with manufacturers in these big group buys. I’ll be lurking around here for a while, I think.
In the free software world, it’s pretty normal for things to be created based on what the community wants. Frequently, the community just makes its own stuff, scratching its own itches. BLF has a similar “make what you want” culture, but it involves physical goods instead of just data, and physical goods can’t yet be copied over the internet. So several of us have been trying to get manufacturers to participate in this process, in order to make cool things available to anyone who wants them.
Cory Doctorow based some of his main writing themes on free software culture. It’s a major plot element in his “Little Brother” book, and is applied to a hardware context in “Makers”, and is applied to artistic works in “Pirate Cinema”. He’s pretty into this stuff.
He writes about it as sci-fi, usually, but… it’s not fiction. It has been an ongoing and growing movement since the mid-1900s, and is now the code foundation for the majority of the internet.
Realize I’m a few weeks behind here, but this caught my eye:
Having done mechanical design in a past career where we outsourced most production and and concept-design-production workflows with relatively simple CNC (laser cutters) as a hobbyist I feel like point 3 is a bit simplified.
There’s appreciable effort that goes into the design itself, for sure. Someone that produces their own finished product will have some experience with what’s feasible to produce and bake that into the design document.
But having a good design - a production-ready design - isn’t the same thing as having production plans.
Whenever I design a tabbed box for laser cutting, translating the design file into a work file takes appreciable time - layout for material efficiency and optimizing geometry for cutting efficiency being the key tasks.
When dealing with machining metal parts the design to work document process may well be more involved. Tool choices, speed/feed considerations far more involved than laser cutter power/feed, material selection, jigs/workholding, production sequencing (since intermediate parts may be needed between workstations/schedules), QC processes, production scheduling concerns, negotiating slight dimensional changes that could make/break the concept for your capabilities and/or the client’s needs, etc.
Suspect that the prospect for future sales of a design that’s expected to be successful beyond the initial discounted batches - and presumably without encumbrances - is the true carrot.