Over the past 5 years, I have been experimenting with enclosures available online to protect electronic circuitry mostly from dust and to bring an elegance to my mess of wires in the project.
I started out with a Simple Solar Li ion battery charging circuitry which had 1 18650 cell of Li ion battery with the associated circuitry as a personal project. I had assembled a printed circuit board(PCB) and soldered the components using a locally bought soldering kit
I first ventured out to digikey.com and mouser.com, the popular US websites for procuring electronics at hobby and professional manufacturing.
At that time I was also professionally involved in procurement of electronic components for products to make for Indian market, we were heavily dependent on these online electronics distributers from the US to run a small batch of manufacturing prototypes and testing in India.
I checked the dimension of the PCB, associated battery and Connectors and and after careful consideration picked the most economical amongst them. Funny thing about enclosures is that there are no predefined holes for cable through fare!! One has to drill holes according to ones requirement.
Here is a snapshot of the invoice of the enclosure I had procured in 2017
Enclosure Invoice
This enclosure kind of fit in my hand
Here are some of the modifications I did on the enclosure I did for cable and connector management, with help of a drill machine
This was about 5 years back, looking currently at the digikey website I was kind of presently surprised of its availability still now
Here is a snapshot of the current pricing as of 15th Jan 2023
I can see the bump in price by a dollar from the price I had access in 2017
(Kind of expected with COVID scenario)
On the hindsight, I calculated the Price of electronics components including PCBs and the enclosure and saw that the humble enclosure made up almost 50% of the prototype cost. Also the fact that I was being charged customs and shipping fee in order of 40% did not further make this option appealing as a hobbyist
Over the period of 5 years, I have tried to optimize the size of the PCB and also experimented with several enclosure from different sources to optimize the cost
I sourced few enclosure from aliexpress of China in early 2018, the delivery times seemed erratic and quality questionable
I also tried sunrom electronics based out of Ahmedabad, India
https://www.sunrom.com/p/enclosure-90x70x28mm
However the material seemed to be brittle and drilling holes for cable management would often result in cracks in the enclosure
After loads of experimentation, Do you know the best enclosure I found after these 5 years?
Its the humble PVC pipe with end cap!!
Not only will this protect your hobby projects from dust at times with the right adhesive can also protect from water(After all there is a reason these are employed to transport water)
Here is an example of how I modified a PVC endcap to house a circular LED powered by Li ion battery to function as a portable emergency lamp
Pros of PVC as Electronic Enclosure
- Easily available in local hardware shops throughout India
- They are available in all sizes / diameters.
- I can later spray paint the PVC with any colour to make it aesthetically appealing and the over all cost is very nominal compared to online sources
- Can become water proof with right adhesives
So now I am in love with these PVC pipes as enclosure for my personal projects. you would see lot more experiments on them moving forward from 2023
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