I had stumbled upon Ponoko, a service that laser cuts a variety of materials to order. It seemed like a great way to put the case together. The short version: the end result is way better than anything I could have managed on my own, layout is a pain, and the service is pricier than one would expect.

Now the long version. With the basic idea of what I wanted sketched out and major issues like connector accessibility figured out, I thought that I was ready to go ahead and make the case for the RetroRiter. Early on, I decided to use Ponoko, which forced some decisions early on.

First of all: it gave me a timeline. I created a new account with thing (I am annoyed by the trend of forcing users to create accounts even to browse certain websites) while trying to learn more about the service. They sent me a $20 off code that had to be used in 10 days. So this gave me an incentive to layout the design and order it at the cost of doing a bit of a rushed job.

Picking Ponoko meant that I would be following their software recommendations: a vector based drawing program. Laser cutter instructions are encoded by the color of lines draw: blue lines 0.01 mm wide are cuts through the material, read means an engraved line. Gray fills are etched. This made getting started easy, especially since I am familiar with Inkscape. However, as the design was coming together I was soon wondering if learning an actual CAD program would be easier in the long run. Or maybe I need to learn more about Inkscape's features. For future projects, I think I would look around a bit to see if other options would have made my life easier, like easily being able to measure lines instead of calculating the difference between points all of the time. I don't know how much of the learning curve was from the inherit difficulty in the task or from using an inappropriate tool.

I also selected the case material earlier on: birch plywood. I thought the wood would lend more personality than acrylic and the birch plywood was a good mix of cheap and thickness. A note: the wood materials all seem to have a range of possible widths which could be problematic for making joints.

With this in mind, I set about laying out a .svg according to Ponoko's requirements (which is now in the github repo, but needs some fixes). This took a long time. Since the end cost factors in how long it takes the laser cutter, I did a few things to (maybe) cheapen things: corners were not rounded, small crosses mark screw locations (instead of cutting holes), and the left out any sort of engraved parts. The birch plywood only comes in two sizes: P1 and 1'x2'. P1 was too small, leaving me to use the larger size which was way too big. If I had more time I would have waited to add more parts to fill in the space, but I finally decided just to put the order in to keep the project rolling and take advantage of the $20 coupon.

However, the coupon only really covers shipping: the slowest option cost $19.96, making Ponoko's "make your first product for free" claim a little misleading. Shipping on the smaller P1 size for birch plywood was still about $17. Maybe other materials ship for less. Materials where $9.50 and cutting cost was about $12, so my end cost was just over twenty bucks. Which isn't bad. But I'm not sure I would have paid forty for it. I guess I'll have to figure something out for future jobs (recommendations welcome).

Next update: the laser cut pieces arrive and I realize all of my mistakes.