Bloke hews plywood Raspberry Pi tablet It's a tip of the hat today to Michael Castor, who caught our eye with his attractive fusion of plywood, carbon fibre and Raspberry Pi, dubbed the "PiPad". Top view of the PiPad Michael's plan was to build an "all-in-one system that was usable, portable, and Linux-based", but which also "had to look good". Furthermore, it …
Well done for having done it, but there are far more interesting things going on in the maker, hacking and repurposing communities for those willing to seek them out. This doesn't even have the appeal of being cheap to do.
Perhaps that's the real message - that it doesn't matter how low-cost the motherboard is (be that a Raspberry Pi or anything else), it's the cost of everything else which is the main obstacle to turning that into something useful and usable.
Sir, you are a Sandbender. I know of no higher praise.
"It started with a woman who was an interface designer ... Her husband was a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there. . . . And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone. . . . And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions."
Gibson. Idoru. GIYF.
There are lots of shops with CNC routers that will make you the parts you want. Unless you plan to open a business, it's probably cheaper than buying one. I looked at building my own CNC router once. It was cheaper to buy a used commercially made one on eBay and even cheaper to send CAD drawings to shop and have them ship back the parts in a day or so. Going DIY is fun, but not always the cheapest alternative. If you still want to build your own, look for a parts kit of the major mechanical bits or find a deal on a used/not-working one that will yield most of the more expensive kit.
Russian birch ply is marvelous stuff. You can cut yourself on the edges if you are not careful. They make junk ply too, but that doesn't usually get exported since worse can be had for even less from South American and Indonesia. Finland birch ply is the absolute top. The sheet with outdoor rated phenolic adhesive is incredible. Apple ply is a compromise for larger projects where cash is tight. Typically, the more individual plies, the better and you also want it to be void free.
The carbon fibre is cool, but remember that it's electrically conductive. Mounting a PCB with the connections contacting the CF might short out. It's not a dead short, so sometimes it could just lead to unexpected weirdness. Shorting battery connections could lead to a fire.
A speaker manufacturer built some 18" woofers carbon fibre cones for PA systems and began getting them back with fire damage. The leads to the coil contact the cone and with a high power amplifier, there was enough current flowing through the CF between the leads to start a fire. Oops.
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