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prakashlab / octopi-driver-board

Driver electronics for the Octopi and Squid microscope families.
https://squid-imaging.org/
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Design a laser-cut baseplate and cap plate #13

Open ethanjli opened 3 years ago

ethanjli commented 3 years ago

The standoff legs under PP-T41 are long enough that they could break if they aren't stabilized by a baseplate underneath, so we should design one (BE, short for Base Enclosure). We could add a laser-cut hole for the heatsink+fan, and we could also add mounting holes for optical table screw grids. This baseplate would also stabilize the stack to put on its side (e.g. on the left or rear edges of the planes), so we could add some engraved labels documenting the stack for readability in those orientations.

We could also design a cap plate (CE, short for Cap Enclosure) on top to protect the stacking connector and any connectors on the top plane, potentially with mounting holes for HMI boards; and we could add some engraved labels documenting the stack.

In the future, we could design two alternates: one which follows the 150 mm x 150 mm footprint format, and one with overhangs (which would allow acrylic sheet bending to be used to make a case held in place by the overhangs). This is out of the scope of this issue.

In the future, we could design alternates for the baseplate with mounting holes for a Raspberry Pi and for a Jetson Nano, which could be offset so that cables don't stick out the right edge of the board as much or at all.

ethanjli commented 3 years ago

I've prototyped a minimal baseplate enclosure as BE-Minv0.1.0, in Onshape; it fits nicely. However, text (e.g. from Onshape) doesn't export correctly into DXF for laser-cutter engraving and has to be re-added properly in Inkscape. The next step is to investigate whether FreeCAD can do better.