Making Something Attractive? Normally, one wants an enclosure to be both functional and attractive. As I started into this task, though, I very quickly learned that "attractive" is not really part of my skill set. It's especially challenging when the electronics (ie, the bulky guts that I'm trying to cover up with my enclosure) have already been designed and built and can't be altered. This imposes some challenging constraints on the enclosure. So, I set aside the goal of making it attractive and I focused on simply making it functional.
First Attempt: Working with a fellow engineer who knows more about CAD than I do, we decided to use a two piece design that would sandwich the electronics and battery. We'd 3D print the two pieces of the enclosure and hold the whole thing together with four small screws. As you can see below, our first design ended up being pretty boxy.
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Our first design. Boxy! |
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Revising the design to make it slimmer and easier to slide down into a pocket. |
Real-World Experience: With the real, physical print of design #4, we were able to put it all together for the first time -- electronics plus battery plus top and bottom enclosure. Almost immediately, I realized that I needed access to the Teensy's reset button, which was covered by our enclosure. Oops! So, we added a round hole to expose the reset button (see #5 above). Then, we further expanded the hole to expose the SD card (#6 above). Unsure if the hole was big enough, we took our 3D print of design #4 and used a dremel tool to cut the square hole (see picture below). It wasn't pretty, but the hole worked just fine to access the SD card.
The opening to expose the SD card isn't attractive, but it does work. |
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Our final design. Download it from our GitHub! |
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Fitting the Tympan electronics into the FDM-printed enclosure. |