XM Design Standards
To facilitate effective design-prototyping methods in the Open Source Ecology project, the following process is to be followed for design leading to fabrication:
- Initial design may be made in any medium (Sketchup, paper, etc)
- Design is converted to a professional 3D CAD design format
- 2D fabrication drawings are created for fabrication. These should be annotated with fabrication instructions and other helpful notes.
- Isometric assembly drawings are created to facilitate assembly procedure by fabricator
- Exploded part diagram is created for assembly
- Complete bill of materials (BOM) with sourcing is extracted from Exploded Part Diagram
- Note: Present difficulty for generating BOMs is that a professional software package does not let you sum up lengths of stock materials used if a certain stock material has been machined or otherwise processed - when it's not recognized as a pieces of stock. One way around this is to name parts as, the stock from which they came. Then, one generates a part list, without total lengths of stock materials. Thus, materials lists must be summed by hand when they are being purchased as stock lengths. If parts are being ordered as cut sections of stock, then CAD can be used to generate a complete, usable part list.
- The requirement for a Bill of Materials is that it includes sourcing information in addition to part names
