Weeknotes

Week 189 – New Laser Tube and Ultamation Show Production Hardware

19th January 2015

Each week we’ll endeavour to publish some details of the interesting things that members of DoES Liverpool have been up to over the past seven days. You can find out a bit more about them in our introductory post.

And remember, if you’re involved with DoES Liverpool at all, let us know what you get up to so we can include it here!

Things of Note

Coming Up in the Next Week

Monday 19 January, 6:00pm-9:00pm Sewing Club
Tuesday 20 January, 7:00pm-8:00pm Liverpool Drones Meetup
Wednesday 21 January, 6:30pm-8:00pm Friends of the Earth

2 comments on Week 189 – New Laser Tube and Ultamation Show Production Hardware

  1. Oliver Hall says:

    Adrian – I hadn’t realised you’d posted, so I’ve just stumbled on this while looking for info about becoming a “Friend of DoES”.

    I just wanted to say: Without organisations like DoES and people like Adrian (and the gang) (and I have to admit, I’m not aware of any others in Liverpool!) we’d have had a MUCH more laborious time in developing our product. The access to tools that would wouldn’t have been able to justify purchasing ourselves, like the laser cutters or 3D printers have meant we could rapidly prototype things that would have cost hundreds or thousands to do the traditional way.

    I contacted Liverpool Vision fairly early on in the hope that they would be able to put us in touch with people who could guide us through the jungle of “first time production” and, without going into the details, the whole experience was utterly futile and frustrating. Rather than understand our needs and provide support, the focus seemed to be firmly around which grants we could leech into.

    The TRUE value is in these small passionate groups, like DoES, who didn’t provide money, but instead took *interest* in what we wanted to do, let us use their facilities (mostly donated by other supporters), put us in touch with other passionate people and generally showed enthusiasm for our project. They’re the ones that should be being funded if we really want Liverpool to rise up as a centre of excellence in new technology. The knock on benefits will be tangible – on this project alone, we’ve engaged with the Universities (thank you to the EE dept and Innovation Voucher scheme), component suppliers, local electronics assembly contractors, sheet metal fabricators, plastic housing manufacturers, packaging designers, graphic designers… the list goes on.

    Suffice to say, without DoES, I don’t think we’d have made it.
    Thanks guys.

  2. Oliver Hall says:

    Adrian – I hadn’t realised you’d posted, so I’ve just stumbled on this while looking for info about becoming a “Friend of DoES”.

    I just wanted to say: Without organisations like DoES and people like Adrian (and the gang) (and I have to admit, I’m not aware of any others in Liverpool!) we’d have had a MUCH more laborious time in developing our product. The access to tools that would wouldn’t have been able to justify purchasing ourselves, like the laser cutters or 3D printers have meant we could rapidly prototype things that would have cost hundreds or thousands to do the traditional way.

    I contacted Liverpool Vision fairly early on in the hope that they would be able to put us in touch with people who could guide us through the jungle of “first time production” and, without going into the details, the whole experience was utterly futile and frustrating. Rather than understand our needs and provide support, the focus seemed to be firmly around which grants we could leech into.

    The TRUE value is in these small passionate groups, like DoES, who didn’t provide money, but instead took *interest* in what we wanted to do, let us use their facilities (mostly donated by other supporters), put us in touch with other passionate people and generally showed enthusiasm for our project. They’re the ones that should be being funded if we really want Liverpool to rise up as a centre of excellence in new technology. The knock on benefits will be tangible – on this project alone, we’ve engaged with the Universities (thank you to the EE dept and Innovation Voucher scheme), component suppliers, local electronics assembly contractors, sheet metal fabricators, plastic housing manufacturers, packaging designers, graphic designers… the list goes on.

    Suffice to say, without DoES, I don’t think we’d have made it.
    Thanks guys.

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