Chapter 2/10: How do you get the plates and poles built from the LibreCAD design?

I'm reading through Chapter 2, learning about LibreCAD and such. I'm wondering how do you actually build the plates and poles: what kinds of materials should you use, what kinds of companies should I use, or should I do it myself? What is a reasonable price to expect, what is the process like. In general, how do we go from design to manufactured item? As a non-engineer this is really useful information.

While this may be common knowledge to experienced robotics people and engineers, this book is geared more to the novice, so I'd expect a bit more information.

We have a description of the design specs in LibreCAD (Chapter 2), but then magically these manufactured parts appear in Chapter 10 (e.g., the pic on page 230). I noticed that at the turtlebot site (http://www.turtlebot.com/build/) there are lots of places that sell the hardware, but if the intent was to buy the parts, why bother with CAD? I'd like to do this myself, so I can have experience at each stage of the design process.

I posted the above question at Stack Exchange Robotics site, and got a decent start to an answer:
http://robotics.stackexchange.com/questions/9965/how-to-get-manufactured-part-from-cad-file

Let's treat this as a placeholder for now: I'll post more details as I make progress.

Hi neuronet

First of all, i would like to say sorry for the confusion !!

First, i would like to explain about the LIBRECAD design

In the design, i have included the dimension of poles and holes in the bot, but didn't mention the manufacturer or cost. The thing is, this is a DIY prototype, so you can do it from a local engineering garage or from maker spaces or fab labs.

For the poles, i have used hollow aluminium rods, and inserted hard plastic into on the tips. Drilled a hole on the plastic, and one can screw one pole on the other. The aim of design is to get an idea about the robot building procedure. You can take this design as a reference and make your own designs. You can put any kind of layers on the top base layer.

What most important is the base layer only, other layers are only for placing things on the robot. You can even think about 3D printing the parts.

Please post your doubts if you still have confusion

Sorry again

Nice we have a celebrity here the author of the book--thank you very much for your first post!

Thanks for the information I have spoken with people at a local makers space meetup and they were very helpful and have directed me how to use a laser cutter to cut acrylic, and they also have two 3d printers at the makers space. They basically told me exactly what you just said: they suggested from looking at the book, that you were saying basically it doesn't matter that much, as long as it will work, just build it! I plan to use laser cutter to cut 1/4 inch acrylic base plate and the other plates.

Past two weeks I've been spending time building a computer that will let me run Blender, because my old laptop wouldn't run it without crashing, so I've just finished building a Linux box and will post about this very soon, and then about Blender, and a lot more.

Thanks again.