Electronic Boxes

Personally when I’m doing a project that involves electronics I HAVE to build a sturdy enclosure for them. It took me a good while but I now have both a nice power supply case and a Arduino/RAMPS case.

First the power supply case. I really had a difficult time finding a suitable sized case to fit a power supply, looked high and low but nothing. I did manage to find an old steel box I got from an old Grand Theft Auto 4 special edition package.

I took to the box with a Dremel and removed some of the cases length. I then CNC’d a new side with vents for air intake/exhaust and a new base for the box to sit on. I then drilled a bunch of holes and routed some squares to mount everything.

End result quite a respectable power supply case that keeps the dangerous voltages well away from me and looks quite good doing it.

Next is the electronics case for the Arduino Mega and RAMPS 1.4 board. I originally had planned on putting this case in a plastic box I had brought. I had it all set up in the box when I realized I just wasn’t happy with how it looked and I couldn’t seem to figure out how to mount the tiny SD RAMPS extension board.

On that note what I pain it is to mount the SD RAMPS board full stop. It had no mounting holes and I ended up having to CNC out a little pocket for it to sit in and a clamp to hold it tight – What an effort!

The box was cut on my CNC router from 4mm rigid PVC and was glued together with CA. I also cut out on the CNC a nice motherboard tray I guess you could call it. You mount the Arduino Mega to it first then it goes into the box. This makes it easy to pull out the Arduino and RAMPS board if I ever need to service them.

As I’m writing this I just had eye surgery yesterday so my apologies if I’ve made any mistakes in my writing – It’s quite hard to see!