Transcript:
Everyone in this fusion 360 video. I’m Li teaching you how to design an enclosure for an Arduino Uno. And I’m going to recording myself along the way, just so you can see how fast it is. See my thought process throughout, see the mistakes that I know I’m going to make and how I fix those mistakes and hopefully learn a thing or two along the way, so let’s get started by creating a blank design and I’m going to start off by creating a sketch that really drives most of my design for this enclosure, so I’ll start by making a two-point rectangle, so under sketch, I’ll choose two-point rectangle, and I’m referencing some dimension drawings that I have. I can include a link to them in the description at the bottom of this video. They’re actually really handy, and I think better than other dimension drawings that I could find, so I’m going to start by modeling Just the outside shape of my Arduino followed by some holes and I’m going to make these two point Eight millimeters in diameter. If you’re familiar with Arduino, you know, the mounting holes are actually three point two millimeters. So why am I making these two point eight? Well, that’s how big the mounting hole is, and I’m actually going to be modeling some pins. They’re going to slide through those mounting holes and I don’t want them to. You know, struggle to fit through there. I want there to be a clean fit between them, but some nice friction, so I’m going to go for two point eight and now using that same dimension drawing, I can dimension these relative to my Arduino. So I’m going to mention that distance from there to here to be 2.5 and again this is all under sketch and sketch dimension, and now I’m going to dimension the distance from that center point to here, and that’s 14 and I’m going to repeat the command and dimension there to here, And that is actually fifteen point three. I made the mistake of thinking that that’s 14 as well. It’s not I made an enclosure that didn’t fit, so make sure those are different distances and I will set the distance from here to here to be fifty point seven, and I’m going to go ahead and do the same thing for these. So this one this distance is going to be thirty five point five, and it is best practice to dimension from two common edges. It makes it a little bit cleaner and this one is seven point six, and, Lastly, we have a few more dimensions here to here is going to be sixty six point. One and this one is actually vertical from the other one. This is sixty six point one as well so now. I have the holes dimensioned up. I’m going to be building the enclosure around my Arduino and I want it to have a little bit of wiggle room. I don’t want it to have to fit perfectly within the enclosure, so I’m going to use the offset tool to offset this out by just one millimeter. Give me a little bit of space and now. I’ll select these edges by shift, selecting them, right, click and choose normal slash construction to make them some construction lines. I’ll click stop sketch. And now I can choose extrude and I can extrude these profiles up, so let me select these profiles, and this is just really the main form of my enclosure. I’m going to go with 22 millimeters tall and there. We have it the next thing I’m going to do is actually shell out my body. So let me go ahead and choose shell and what body do. I want to shell. Well, it’s the one I just created, so Ill. Click that how thick if I make it one point six millimeters, it’ll actually just take two layers or two shells, rather of a 3d print with a point. Four millimeter nozzle. It’s two shells, and I want to shell outside, so I’ll click. OK, and now I want to split this in half, so I’m going to create a construction plane. That’s a mid plane between the top and the bottom half, and now that will adjust to whatever size box I have. So let me go ahead and split the body with that plane, and now I have a top and a bottom half and I can turn off my construction plane and that looks a little thin. I might have messed up the shell so let me right. Click on the shell command and choose edit. And what do you know? I did, so I’ll make that one point-six not one and outside because I don’t want to kind of swallow up any of the air. Do you know I want to create a shell outside of it? So now I have my proper shell that way now. I’m going to turn the visibility. My sketch back on. I’m going to extrude these circles that I drew to create those mounting pins are going to go through the mounting holes of my Arduino. I’m going to extrude them up, and I know to this surface. It’s going to be 11 which is half a 22 but I really want them to extend further so that they can actually snap with the top part of this enclosure and hold it all in place, so I’m going to extrude four millimeters past this top surface and there we go the last step. I have is to create some standoffs, so I’m going to create a sketch on this bottom face, and I’m going to draw in. Some standoffs and standoffs really helps support the Arduino. Bring it to a certain height. I’m going to make them. Let’s see four millimeters in diameter and this is because the Arduino doesn’t lay perfectly flat on the bottom of the PCB. You have a bunch of extra metal and solder on the underneath side from all the connections. So you don’t really want to place it on the bottom of your enclosure because it’s hard for it to stay flat and hard to position all your holes for all your inputs and outputs. So by using these standoffs, you’ll allow yourself to kind of raise it off the bottom floor of your enclosure and really accurately create some cutouts, so I’m going to extrude these profiles up, and if you just take some measurements of an Arduino, you’ll see that, you know if you do about four millimeters that should be enough. It looks like I selected the wrong profile here. So if I hold command, I can deselect that one and change it to that. Outer profile and four millimeters should be enough and there we have it and the next step that I have is to create some receiving parts on the top half of this box. I actually notice that I forgot to add some Phillips here, so it doesn’t look too nice and I’ve already shelled it. So if I fill it at the outside here, I lose that uniform wall thickness, which would be pretty messy. So I’m going to drag my cursor or my timeline behind that she’ll command and now. I’m going to apply a fill it here that way. I keep that nice uniform wall thickness, and you’ll see. I don’t have to undo anything. I can just add a fill it. Maybe I’ll make it three hit. Enter and now. I’ll hit this button to run to the end of my timeline, and I can hide the top or the bottom, and you’ll see we have that uniform wall thickness. So now what I’m going to do is create a sketch on this face and what I want to do is project in the pins that I already have. I want to be able to reference them, so I’ll choose project and I’ll choose that surface along with this surface. This one and this one. I’ll hide that body. And now I have those profiles and I’m going to select them. Let me hide that body. Select those projected lines and I’m just going to make them construction lines. I don’t want them to get in the way of any profiles. So now they’re just there for reference, and now I’ll make the hole for what those pins go into. I’m going to make this a 3.2 millimeter hole. If you remember my mounting pins were 2.8 so I, you know, I you can learn the hard way that if you make the mounting holes 2.8 as well, it’s not going to fit in there. You’re gonna have a hard time snapping this lid together, so I’m going to give it a little bit of clearance so that everything fits nicely And now I’m going to make this 52 that way. These receiving portions are actually one millimeter thick around in radius or offset in the diameter by two millimeters so 52 And I’ll do the same over here 52 I’ll click stop sketch and I’ll turn on the top part of my enclosure. I’ll extrude these profiles and how far I want to extrude. Well, It’s 11 to this top part, and I know I have 4 millimeters of overlap from the pins. I may want to offset this. Maybe just make it 10 millimeters. So they’re slightly lower than where this is splitting just to keep things clean, and I still have 3 millimeters of intersection between them. Now If I come over here, one quick thing I’m going to do is add a small chamfer. I like these kind of ease into the slot, so I’m going to choose chamfer and chamfer off the top of these pins so that we can gradually push them in. And if I do a point four millimeter chamfer, that’ll be nice. It’s a factor of my layer height, which is 0.2 millimeters so it should create that chamfer no problem the next step. I have is bringing in an Arduino so I went ahead and downloaded this online. I imported it to my project, and now I can, right. Click and choose insert. Let me bring in this. Arduino and there it is and I’ll click, OK? I’ll close the data panel and I’ll quickly create some components out of the bodies that way I can actually create an assembly, so Ill right-click and choose create components. And now you can see. I move the parts all over the place, so Ill right-click or actually click and rename this to be enclosure bottom and this one enclosure top and I’ll right-click on the bottom and choose ground, so it doesn’t go anywhere, and now I can apply a joint. So which pieces of geometry do I want to align? Well, let’s align the bottom of this hole to how about the top of this. Stand off right here. So let me orbit around. And how about like that? So now you’ll see that it brings those two pieces of geometry together. I have a rigid joint and let’s look at it from the top. Everything looks great, so I’ll click. OK, and now I can add one more joint to place the lid on here, so I’ll choose joint and let’s just align that with a let’s see here if I zoom in. See if that worked, just let me try it one more time. Repeat joint and let’s go with that point, and that point there we go and I’ll do rigid. I could do slider to kind of animate it moving up and down, but I’ll leave this at rigid, and I can do some animations later. So there we have it. We have the top and bottom in place we have on. Arduino in there and it looks great a few things when you do or make some cutouts. So I’m going to create an offset plane on this surface and I’m going to create a sketch on that offset plane and the reason I didn’t sketch on this face is I didn’t want to bring in this geometry necessarily. I just wanted a clean sketch on that face without bringing it in. So that’s a little bit of a tip right there. And now what I’m going to do is project in some geometry from the Arduino. So how about this port right here? And now I can start importing in or start projecting in some of these edges that I like. So how about just the outer perimeter? It’s not registering it as a loop, so I’m just going to have to click these edges myself, not too bad and one more over here. I’ll click OK, and if I hide the Arduino, you’ll see that we have those profiles and I’m going to make this one a construction line again, so I have some cleaner profiles, and I want to offset this slightly because this is the exact size of the the components that are sticking out of my Arduino and if they’re slightly bigger or smaller at a different angle. I want this to still fit, so I’m going to choose offset and offset by maybe just half a millimeter outside, give myself a little bit of wiggle room and offset this half a millimeter as well. I’ll choose stop sketch. And now I can extrude those two profiles, so let me click on both of those. And if I go in, I’ll make a cut and I want this to be dynamic. I want it to adjust to the thickness of my Arduino so instead of just extruding them blindly some random amount. I’ll say extrude them to this inner surface, and now when my wall thickness changes, so will that extrusion, and before I click, OK? I’ll make sure that my top enclosure component is visible as well, so it cuts through that component. Just like that If I turn my Arduino visibility on now, you’ll see it poking through. You might be wondering, you know. Why are you making an enclosure for this? If right now, we can’t actually access the pins in my Arduino. So it’s pretty hard to prototype with this. We’d have to take the top off, and that’s a little bit of a pain, so what I want to do is make some cutouts on this top surface so that I can access those pins. So let me hide the actually. I want to hide anything. Let me just project in some of that geometry from the Arduino and I don’t want to project in all of this mess. I just want to project in. How about that corner and this corner and then this one and this one Ill click. OK, hide the Arduino. And now what I can do. Oops, I guess I messed that up. Let me try one more time project and give me this corner there we go now what I can do is just draw some two-point rectangles to kind of snag that geometry, So I’ll click here in here and here and there just like that. And if you’ll see right now, it matches up perfectly again. I might want to give myself a little bit of wiggle room. So how about if I do an offset of 0.5 millimeters and Ill? Do it again over here. Oh, point five millimeters and I’ll click stop sketch, Turn on the top, and I will now extrude again, so I’ll choose extrude these two profiles, and I will again Do an extrude two, and I want to extrude to this inner surface. Looks like I selected some profiles. Let me deselect those and try it one more time this profile and holding command. Let me click that one and this one and this one there we go so now. I have that extrusion. I have access to my Arduino pins and everything looks pretty good. I could print this out and it’s a working enclosure, but I want to make it look a little bit nicer. So how about I add some champers to the top and the bottom and again? I’m just going to do a factor of my layer. Height, which is 0.2 millimeter so 0.6 works pretty well. And then if I look at it from the top, I don’t really need all of this. Closed off area. It doesn’t look super nice, and I want to add something a little bit more artistic. So how would I create a sketch on this top face and I’m going to draw a line here from this corner to this corner, so that’s from one hole to the other, and I could draw another line from this corner to this corner, but I don’t really like the way it blends in with these curves here, so I’m actually going to use the spline tool and draw a spline from this corner to this corner and then I’ll move. These handles around to make it tangent, so I’ll click on the line and move the handle to that corner and there we have it so now. I want to create this sort of grill pattern and to do that. I’m just going to draw a line actually first. I’ll draw a construction line that goes all the way down at a 90 degree angle. I’ll left click and select it and right click and turn it into a construction line and now I’ll draw one sort of arbitrary line that goes perpendicular between those, and this is how I like doing it just making it arbitrary and then dimensioning it to make sure it’s where I want it, and if I have these three point, five millimeter openings, I can do a quick measure, actually to make sure they are three point. Five, let’s see and let’s try that research. The selection here, two here three point five millimeters and end to end. We have 52 millimeters there. We go! I can know that if I have a certain number of these openings, I can calculate the spacing in between. So I believe when I did this last time. I wrote it down if I had nine openings and eight full spacers in between and I wrote down the the width of that spacer to be two point. Five six to five millimeters. You can do the math on that. I think that’s right and what I’m actually going to do is now instead of drawing these lines at that spacing at two point, six five, then at three point five. I’m just going to use a pattern, so I’ll just do a rectangular pattern, this object and this object in this direction, and now how far we’re going to do it. What’s the extent of this pattern and really? I want it to end up here. But what’s this exact value well? It has something to do with those three numbers. I mentioned so search was 52 and then we can subtract the distance for two of these 3.5 openings, which is seven and you can see you can start typing in some numbers here to make sense and then lets Lastly subtract that 2.5 six to five that we have up at the top here, and now you’ll see it ends perfectly. And how many of these do we want? We’re going to have eight of them like. I mentioned and I’ll click. OK, and I’ll do a quick measure to make sure that this is still 3.5 and that any one of these small ones is still two point. Five, six, three, but we’ll add another decimal and there’s six two five, so I’ll click stop sketch. I’ll choose extrude. I’ll select these bigger profiles that I’d like to cut out and I’ll just hide the Arduino and the bottom and also extrude to that way if I change the thickness, so it’ll update I’ll click OK, and now I’ve made that nice-looking cut up, so I can turn on the Arduino and the bottom, and there we have it. So that’s how we can model a Arduino uno enclosure. I think we did that in about 20 minutes. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comment section below and let me know. Do you like these kind of videos? Do you like seeing my thought process as I go through these problems and make mistakes and fix those problems throughout? And if you want to reach out to me directly, you can tweet me at Taylor. Underscore Stein and as always thanks for watching.