Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Solar Power 5: Who Needs a Design and Marketing Department Anyway?

After a somewhat fruitful day of drilling the end pieces, I began today by cutting all of the rest of the parts. I don't know anything about design, but I found a cool logo online that inspired my sun/power button logo. I figured a white press-fit logo and the "USB" letters would make them 'pop' and lead to an overall professional-looking piece of technology.



The dimensions are really hard to imagine when looking at the Solidworks CAD files, so I didn't expect the letters in the logo to be so small. Getting good press fits there is going to be tough. I also want to change the raster settings for the letters that are just getting etched in. I spent a lot of time trying to find a font I liked, but that also had a zero-weight version for the "Lithium Ion Solar USB Charger" part, so that the etch would come out looking clean - turns out Microsoft doesn't have any. I think I also want to do a real raster for the larger letters, so that the whole letter is slightly "hollowed out" of the top layer. On to the rest of the sides though, this is my first practice "build" of the enclosure:




And here's with the screws and circuitry in place, but without the captured nut actually holding everything in place:




I've realized that if the screw holes are slightly out of place, the edges of the box will be horribly mismatched, so I might need to build some more tolerance into the design and drill larger holes, allowing the screws to move into the correct position.

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