Week #2: Make-through

This week's assignment we were asked to design an enclosure with snap fit for an enclosure of a commercially available product.

So I thought designing an enclosure for Arduino would be such a great idea because i already own a one!

• Investigating thingiverse:

The first step i did before designing the box was to look for an ideas for the box and i came up with pretty cool examples actually.

• Enclosure Designing process:

First thing i did was downloading a ready .STEP design for the arduino from grabcad

then i have imported in fusion.

after that i have created a rectangle assigned with arduino's dimensions then i have extruded this rectangle and here the fun part comes, i have reduced the opacity of the rectangle to check if there any errors in the dimensions and everything seemed to be alright.

The box was having a sharp edges so i have added fillets on each edge to look incredibly smooth.

So after finishing the outer look of the box i needed to split the design to 2 pieces so i have used split body tool to do that after selecting the plane of the slicing.

i have also needed to make holes for the DC jack and the USB Cable so i have used project tool to select the 2 ports and i have used extrude tool the selected cut option instead of cut, Also i have used the project tool to select the holes of the arduino to create a guided mounts for the board in the enclosure.

for the joints i have designed a snap fit joint by creating a 4*3 mm rectangle in the bottom box and extruded cut them after that in the top cover i have set a clearance rate of 0.5mm to make the box fits well...then i have created a rectangle and used the chamfer tool to slide down the edges of the rectangle and used the fillet tool on the edges to make sure that it fits well.. during the whole designing process i have used the section analysis tool to make sure that everything is alright and fitted.

last step was to make a cut in the top cover for the pin headers so for this process i have used project tool and extruded cut them.

Last step was to export .STL files to print the enclosure

• Fabrication Process:

to print this design i headed to PrusaSlicer and imported the STL file and set a layer height of 0.2mm and a PETG filament because it has some flexibility than the regular PLA, Last step was to add support for the fits and after slicing the model i took 2 hours to print and a 25gm of filament.

After exporting the GCODE and loading it to the SD card of the printer i have headed to main menu then selected my file then the printer started to heating up and start calibration and printing process....

Then after like 2 hours of printing the box appeared to look awesome and it was perfectly fitted in the arduino without any issues in the fittings.

For a better looking enclosure i have used a lighter to remove the light strings that appeared after printing.