Fully 3D Printed Enclosure

Ribbit-Network / ribbit-network-frog-hardware

The sensor for the world's largest crowdsourced network of open-source, low-cost, GHG Gas Detection Sensors.

https://www.ribbitnetwork.org/

MIT License

96 stars 26 forks source link

Fully 3D Printed Enclosure #18

Closed keenanjohnson closed 2 years ago

keenanjohnson commented 3 years ago

I would really like the sensor to be green-colored, since it is a frog after all.

The enclosure is made of an unknown plastic.

Spray paint would probably be the easiest, but given that this is a greenhouse gas project, I'd like to avoid the aerosols and the nasty volatiles contained within.

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

Awesome! Yes I have all the parts so I'll start a print and test as well for the right fit!

eaudiffred commented 2 years ago

Everything fits together nicely. No issues. Hopefully the hardware fits well!

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

This looks excellent @eaudiffred ! My test print looked good, except for the mount hole for the wifi dongle was a little bit narrow, so I widened it up a bit and I'm printing another now.

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

We're so close I can taste it!

I tried putting everything in the box today and just ran into one issue after adjusting the width for the wifi radio.

When I tried to screw in the compute board, the little screw slot broke off (see pics below). I'm not sure if adding a bit of a fillet around the screw base would be enough to strengthen it? Or if we need to go back to th metal standoffs?

eaudiffred commented 2 years ago

Ahh! You're right, so close! I went ahead and increased the diameter of those posts and also added a fillet. Hopefully that will strengthen it enough. We can go back to the brass stand offs, but the base is only 3mm thick so there isn't much to thread into.

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

Thanks! I'm fairly sure the fillets should be adequate given my past experience with this kind of thing :)

eaudiffred commented 2 years ago

Double check that on the bottom of the board there is enough space for the larger diameter of those posts. Not sure how close any pins or solder comes to the mounting locations. If not, I can bump them back to a smaller diameter.

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

Sounds good! I'll double-check that before a print, but quick glance it looks fine.

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

Okie doke. I printed again to test last night. Great news, the fillet'd mount posts are great and clear the beaglebone fine. Unfortunately, I lost power last night, so the print didn't totally finish, but it finished enough to test most things.

I had to make the model a little bit longer to accommodate the bend radius of the USB cable (see pic below).

I've tried out some of the right-angle cables, but I don't think they save any space unfortunately given the way the cables have to bend around. You can get a sense of this in the image below.

Anyway, the only issue I have now is that the lower shroud piece bolt holes don't seem to line up with the bolts. You can see what I mean in CAD below. Not sure if that's intentional or if that was just an oversight?

eaudiffred commented 2 years ago

Got it corrected. Lengthening the base caused the drawing plane for those two bolt holes to be offset incorrectly. Sorry about that. I've let the function tree get a little out of hand and taken a few short cuts to get things to align properly. Since we have been doing so many little iterative changes it's easy to accumulate a little chaos in the tree. Once we have a set design for rollout I can go back and start cleaning up the trees. Then we will have a clean plate to start the next phase of improvements.

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

Oh derp. My mistake haha. Thanks so much! I'll complete another test print today and then I think we'll be ready to call the major design complete! You rock so much!

keenanjohnson commented 2 years ago

It's done! This design concept is really solid and I feel confident to close out this issue.

Ok I have completed a test print of this enclosure and everything looks great to me! I had to increase the height slightly for the new sensor connectors for the Beaglebone Black, which are taller than I would like, but I'm exploring a custom part in the future which may allow us to shrink this.

I've created https://github.com/Ribbit-Network/ribbit-network-frog-sensor/issues/84 to update the Bill of Materials for the new 3D printed enclosure and parts.

I've merged the OnShape 3D printing branch into the main branch of the assembly. I'm sure we'll make more small tweaks as we go and build sensors, but we can create new Github issues for each of those things as we find them.

Excellent work @eaudiffred! You should be so proud of this and I'm so thankful for the help!