Game Boy Zero case CAD files

[ICMF]

Tooling a mold would cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Injecting individual shells would cost pennies.

[YaYa]

I had a music label 15 years ago and i was producing small batches of 33RPM vinyl LP's. Just the press mold (not injection mold), at this time, was 1500€.
I was producing between 1000/1500 LP's per album, each sold 10€. So that's 10% of the price just for the mold...
Incredibly expensive...

[RetroRocket]

How much would cost to get these made in good plastic in China like the original cases? I mean, it would be hella cool to get this made with mold casting (or whatever it is called) and get printed (like embedded in the case, not just regular ink) a nice "Sudomod's Game Boy Zero" instead of the Nintendo logo hahaha

Injection molding really isn't economically viable unless you're planning production runs of at least a few thousand units. But if you did, the in-mold decorations you're talking about would be quite easy. It'd be prohibitively expensive to have these printed with perfect resolution (SLS), so I think the best bet would be just getting or hiring a top-of-the-line FDM machine with a high-quality nylon filament.

[Elmafioso90]

Woah, let's do as if I didn't say anything lol

Was expecting them to be expensive but this is on whole new level. I'll keep bothering kubino to get more CNC-cut cases for now to get perfectly cut DMG-01's cases

[YaYa]

I'm gonna do the same, his home made CNC machine is more than sufficient for our needs...
My aim is stock look, and this will help

[abrugsch]

Edit: LOL! I didn't see page 2 with all the other replies about the cost of Injection molding
feel free to ignore my addition
/Edit

yeah injection molding has a HUGE startup cost like in the $10000 range, but then an incredibly small unit cost of like less than a penny per item, so you need thousands to make it worth doing, not hundreds. 3D printing (to a similar standard as molding) has a huge unit cost but very very low startup cost. something like this from a service like shapeways (which does SLS printing which has a very high accuracy and quality finish) would cost approx $100-120 per item, BUT without the massive upfront cost of molding.

injection molding can work for lower numbers if you have a base of customers willing to pay over the odds for a part: see the C64 case that was re-printed a couple of years ago and the Commodore Amiga 1200 reproduction case that was designed FROM SCRATCH. each case was priced at about $50 (IIRC) for the C64 (but it was a re-print not made from scratch) and $80-100 for the amiga case. in those situations the interested buyers were in the hundreds (maybe low thousands...) and the cases still had to be priced high to make it financially viable

[neolith]

I have edited the first post with two pictures of the changes on the model and download links.

The model now has two small cuts in the battery slot and pins for the rubber buttons. I also suppressed the counterbores and added a tiny bit of space between the parts for hopefully easier assembly.

Downloads are currently available as IGS, SAT, SMT and STEP files as I know next to nothing about formats for 3D printing and these are the standard exports for Fusion. If you need anything else please tell me and I'll see what I can do.

[YaYa]

I will try the model and let you know if i see something wrong. I own a digital caliper

Thank you for sharing

[YaYa]

So i ended up downloading your files (the IGS one) and managed to get it into sketchup with the help of the trial version of a 3rd party plugin.
Now the design is safe and converted to skp file

First thing that comes to my mind is : wow, the design is really heavy, my super laptop i7 based with 16Gigs RAM is struggling like never just to rotate the design... i will take a look if this is not a drawing / GPU acceleration issue.

Second thing is : wow, it seems really accurate. For now, my build is waiting for Kite's SAIO board, i just finished dremeling what i was needing to dremel. So i know well the shell and it looks like the real one.

I will check some measurements and try to put my 3D designs inside just to see if everything fits good. I'll let you know

Then i thought... oh, i must start using this model.

So the devil took my hand over the touch-pad and i imported your IGS into an Adobe Photoshop 3D layer. The model is handled better than in Sketchup and my laptop was dealing the model very fluently ; so it might be an issue with the import settings within Sketchup (even if i didn't see anything related to options while importing...)

I played a bit with the camera and i thought that i must integrate this model to one of my current graphical projects... So i ended with this lol.
This is the Retail Box for GameBoy Zero cartridges i have designed based on the PSD file provided by VeteranGamer in this post , with the StormTrooper theme screenshots by HoolyHoo found in this post
And now, with the help of your CAD

Thank you very much, keep on working on this model to make it perfect, most people will need this to be able to think their build !

YaYa---GB-Box-Template-3D.png (3.32 MiB) Viewed 19396 times

[kubino]

Yeah the model looks very accurate, great work! Haven't print this yet, but if anybody is interested i can upload stl's