Sometimes the wheel needs to be reinvented. And sometimes it needs to be re-reinvented. For this week’s enclosure project, I remade the enclosure that I tried to remake last week.
I had tried to make a box out of acrylic by gluing the corners together. This time, I wanted to be able to open it and re-open it. I started this week by looking up the correct brackets I’d need on McMaster Carr.
I bought several brackets, 6-32 style screws, and 3” standoffs. I then made sure that every piece of my box had correctly-sized holes for the screws, and correctly-spaced holes for the brackets.
And when I cut out these new pieces everything fit together and could be dis-assembled and re-assembled. It was a huge relief after trying to glue everything perpendicularly last week.
Some parts of it, though, still did need to be glued. The translucent runners that were built to house my Neopixels were too small and delicate for my brackets. For those pieces, I used acrylic weld.
And for the Neopixels themselves, I made tiny holes in the enclosure with the hopes of being able to use thread to sew the strips onto the enclosure. This wound up being an awful lot more time-consuming than I had predicted.
My end result is a much nicer-looking enclosure for my project. In order to make the project functional again, I’ll need to re-make a lot of the PComp elements, but given that that’s outside of the scope of this class, I feel pretty good leaving it here.
