Post date: Jan 22, 2015 4:51:36 AM
Just what the title says. First, the pictures:
The lids and bases, assembled together. The designs were made in Inkscape, and exported to gcode with the "gcodetools" plugin.
Showing the drilled hinges.
Lid milling in progress. This is right before the piece is flipped over to mill the other side.
PCB fitting in the base.
Overall, things look pretty good. Drilling the hinges was something of a nightmare, as breaking the (teeny-tiny) drill bit would likely mean re-milling the whole thing. Fortunately I managed to drill both hinges without catastrophic failure.
The other thing that's really new here is having the bases matched with lids. You can kind of see that there's now a cutout in the base piece, opposite the hinge. That way you can't really apply torque to the hinge when the thing is closed. Of course, that required rewriting the gcode for both the base and the lid, with the results seen above. Neither one is perfect (slight misalignments, nicks from drilling, etc.), but they're both good enough to not warrant the hours that redoing them would entail.
Not shown (but implied, since the board sits in the case) is that I also did the USB cutout. That was surprisingly painless, given the propensity for EVERYTHING to break...
There's still a little left to do.... I need to make a second copy of the electronics, both board and assembly. I also need to finish up the firmware- it's OK now, but I think it could be better. Both boards then need batteries soldered on, which is pretty trivial. Oh, and I should probably figure out a pin for the hinges at some point. Sticking the drill bit in there to make sure it actuates is hardly a permanent solution.
Finally, I'm going to clean up the cases a bit. I've found that rubbing them with a Scotch-Brite pad works really well. It leaves a nice semi-brushed finish and rounds off any sharp corners. As an added bonus, it works with stuff I have on hand, and the chances of it breaking anything are slim to none.
Anyway, that accounts for most of the past two days for me. Totally worth it.