(This is a clone of a Pouet thread of a similar name at truck's request. Some "stuff above"-type references might not make sense as I decline to copy the previous first post due to being all about key fobs for other places.)

So had an idea at some point I think before I started this year's production runs for the Nectarine and Revision key fobs to do something for SceneSat. They were prototyped around the time of the production runs. The end result was two credible designs that I put up a vote app for. Interestingly very few people wanted both, most wanted one or the other. Unfortunately people were split almost 50-50 for each making it harder to get a decent quantity of either.

This is the end result of this past weekend's trip:

There's 60 of each of the squares and rectangles, and 6 of the Spuniks.

Front side of the rectangle:

They're about 6.3cm long by 1.3cm wide and 5mm thick. (2.5" x ~1" x ~3/16") This makes them smaller than the Nectarine ones by a noticeable amount.


Unfortunately I had planned to put the same engraving on the front as the back, but I realized the hole would cut in to the "at" if I did so. Ideas people and I had were mirroring the engraving to fit, lengthening the piece, and putting the URL on the back. Truck's proposition of the URL ended up being the cleanest. I had also tried to put a really small engraved Sputnik back there too, but decided it looked nice and clean with just the URL.

The squuuaaares:

Not much to say here. Uses the same form-factor as the Revision ones. A lot of empty space on the one side.

Sputnik:

Now these, I hate. I don't hate Sputnik, I hate my wood-based representation as a cut-out. When I originally did the tests I had a very high rate of failure: it had to be re-cut many times and most didn't come out of the board. I offered it anyway thinking I could resolve that, and tried to get my jobs done on the large laser at the hackerspace so all 100 Watts of it could really punch these things out.

However, it's more set up for cutting (in terms of how tightly focused the laser is) compared to their small laser, and so the URL in the rectangles never came out right. Since everything was originally in one file (sheet), that was important. So I switched to the small laser to run the job, and ended up breaking out the designs into separate files and none of it ended up running on the big laser. (The probably would have come out a little fuzzy if I had.)

So out of all 24 I tried to cut, I got 6. Now you know why I'm unhappy. I don't have a scientific explanation or anything other than since there's not a lot of straight lines it's possible that even at slower speeds, the small laser's 40 Watts just can't spend enough time to go all the way through.

There is a positive side though: The hackerspace I go to doesn't charge you for failures that are due to reasons not based in design.* So they comped the run of Sputniks. Now, I could have done another run out of 3mm wood, but I had enough to do while out there that it wasn't worth my time to do so. 3mm would also make these things even more fragile. So I skipped.

* Meaning you don't get a pass just because you realized your design sucks (or is wrong) but the actual item came out just fine accounting for that.

They're single sided because it would be really hard to be able to do the backside with an asymmetric design. I don't think it would be impossible, but you'd be spending a lot of your time lining up and testing the laser to do the backside pass with the board flipped to reverse the jig left over from doing the first pass. So I didn't even give doing so any thought.

Finally, no pictures of tests or screw-ups. The tests are kinda boring (fuzzy "scenesat.com"s, and too lightly engraved very tiny Sputniks) and I don't have pictures of the board where the Spuniks didn't come out. Other than that, though, no mistakes in the runs which I think is stellar. If wanted, though, I can post some pictures of the test pieces.

I may not make any more for a while, for a few reasons. The first is directly monetary, the second is that my super-awesome cutting rate ends after next weekend and I don't have enough stuff to do to make re-upping for the same membership level cost effective. I could do a lesser membership level, but the rate is not nearly as good though better than the walk-in rate. This isn't in stone, but my mind would have to be changed before next weekend. ;)

As to relative costs, they would be around € 2.66 (rectangle), € 3.38 (square) as to minimums. To not have to deal with a lot of Euro coins I'd probably ask for something rounded up.