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In our blog we've linked to several pieces of advice for makers looking to go from prototype to small-scale manufacture, from James Lewis' PCB design checklist and Dacian Todea's clever PCB-based PCB enclosure through to Paul Bleisch's cheap custom membrane keypads and Sandy Noble's PolargraphSD write-up. Recently, we linked to Dan Royer's advice on labelling laser-cut parts, as seen in his DIY robotics kits, and now Dan is back with some more valuable advice: rectangular cutting. The tip is simple and elegant: no matter the shape of the parts, Dan cuts them in a rectangle. By ensuring that they're smaller...

We've discussed how low-cost PCB production houses like Dangerous Prototypes' Dirty PCBs provide an easy path for the maker to take a design from the breadboard to small-scale production, but for many the process is still daunting. Like the days of film photography, the idea that you send off your design files, pay a sum of money and wait to receive something which may turn out to be unusable due to a simple error is off-putting - but it shouldn't be. Although PCB design is undeniably a learning process, it's a great skill to have and, at the hobbyist level...

For many electronics hobbyists, creating an enclosure for their creation can be daunting. While the cost of small-scale manufacturing hardware like laser cutters and CNC mills is dropping all the time, and access to such tools on a community basis through hackspaces and the like increasing, there are those who still have no easy way to cheaply produce custom enclosures. Dacian Todea has solved that problem in an interesting way: using layers of PCB to form the case. Using standard FR4 PCB material Dacian, whose project was brought to our attention by Caleb Kraft over on Make, was able to...

One way to be certain to raise our dander here at oomlout is to make it unnecessarily difficult to repair, tinker with or outright replace parts of a project. This is naturally true of commercial, off-the-shelf devices from large companies - who use anti-consumer techniques ranging from bizarre security screws through to gluing everything into place - but is something of which makers can be guilty, too. The path from prototype to product, even through extremely small-scale manufacturing in the home, is full of little non-obvious steps that can be missed - as Dan Royer of Marginally Clever has noted....

The Arduino is, in our eyes, the perfect electronics platform at the hobbyist level. It's cheap, it's open, it's accessible, and it scales: there are Arduinos and compatibles ranging from a handful of components in a breadboard and the even more compact Arduino Pro Mini to the mainstream Arduino Uno and giant Arduino Mega. None of these models could ever be called speed demons, however - and they're not meant to be: they're powered by microcontrollers, not microprocessors, and value real-time operation over high compute performance. That isn't to say you can't squeeze some extra power out of the humble...