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A few months ago I fell into a Nintendo DS for cheap. Somebody wanted a new phone...So once I got my hands on it, I just had to stickerfy it. Here are some shots of the process of putting custom vinyl skins on my ds. This could be a decent little moneymaker. I got it to the point where I could get the stickersto cut right, and got them on pretty consistently, then ran out of summer vacation.
The file for the skin came from Decalgirl.com. They came through with the right proportions, but bigger than the device, probably for ease of design. I just used their file to get something so I didn't have to start from scratch. By putting various colors of vinyl in the machine, it would be possible to change the color of your ds to any number of combinations. It would also be possible to make multicolor vinyl images as well.
The tool that this was done on is the Roland Camm1, which is the sign cutter of choice in the Fab Lab system. Here is a page that shows some of the process for using the vinylcutter in Windows. This one is for CAM, which is used in many of the Fab Labs. Many local sign shops have this tool as well.
these look terrible, just buy a replacement housing on ebay or dealextreme. i got a clear one and threw some blue LED's in there that look awesome.
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I was after the experience of creating what I wanted and needed, and didn't really get to making a beautiful object. There is much more to be done to bring out the possibilities.
One nice thing her is that it must be possible to find similar patterns for many other devices. Ipods, Zunes, specific cellphones, laptops, cameras,and many other things could be used as a place to park a custom designed sticker.
One thing I thought that I would be gaining was the exerience of measuring carefully and using those dimensions to make the drawing used to cut the sticker. By the time I got more than a few measurements, it was time to look them up. While searching for the pattern, probably going for "ds lite skins" or something, I found the file linked to in the post. Rather than have to make the whole design, I was able to adapt that one. It wasn't entirely simple as the drawing was larger, but it worked out ok.
So if anybody would like to try this out as a student or clever person, I would encourage you to give it a try. Post some photos to the Make Flickr pool. Try adding dsliteskin as a tag to make them easier to find
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This is just plain ugly: awful colors, badly cut, bubbles under the stickers...
Better is good's enemy, when some people start messin' around...
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How did THIS become featured? I thought craftsmanship was important.
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