Close

Building the cell enclosure

A project log for Periodic Table of Motion

An open platform for creating installations to show various types of motion. Useful for museums and schools. Composed of individual cells.

bob-baddeleyBob Baddeley 08/16/2015 at 23:350 Comments

Designing the cell enclosure was little more than a box, but it needed some specific features. First, it's constrained to 9" square and 3" depth. Second, we needed space for the cell description. This we arbitrarily set to 3.5". With those specs, I whipped up a design, made it into DXF, and cut it on the laser out of acrylic.

Then I used acrylic adhesive to assemble, and spray painted it black so it would look cool and cover up fingerprints. I used some spacers screwed into the acrylic to attach the PCB.

And BTW, this PCB is awesome. It's so flexible; for the first cell I wanted to build I only needed to populate 4 components! Yay ATTINY!

Then there's the top with a description. This is dummy text and a dummy design, but once some graphic design-fu is applied, there will be a good template ready for any cell.

And that's what a cell looks like! I think in the future I'll use black colored acrylic instead of spray painting clear, which will make assembly so much quicker. I also need to change a few dimensions on some holes, but that's no big deal. Next up I fill the cell with actual mechanics.

Discussions