Nice housing

To make all the electronics studentproof I dicided that it needed a housing. And wouldn't it be nice if it matches the Fabber? So I designed a PMMA housing in Inventor (my 3D program) in the same way the Fabber was build. The only problem is that it isn't possible to make this with a mill because it has some sharp internal corners to make the slots for the nuts.

Last week I went to a Fabtable at the fablab in The Hague (http://www.cabfablab.nl/) were the labmanager offered me to use the machines at the lab. One of wich is a lasercutter! So I asked if I could make the housing on this wonderfull piece of equipment and he said yes.

With some PMMA sheets and the CAD drawings I went to the Fablab and this is what happened:



With a thickness of 6mm the 35W laser was just strong enough to cut trough the material at a rate of 3mm/sec. The panel on the picture took aprox. 15 minutes to cut.

Ofcourse I hadn't brought enough material to cover the first f*ckups but a quick trip to the workshop got me a new sheet. In the end all 6 panels came out very good and all the components fit perfectly.
Front: 2 temperature controllers and the switch for the heater. In between the controllers there is a hole for a switch to control a solenoid. The solenoid can raise or lower one of the extruders.
The main circuitboard is the one from the computer power suply. The board on the right (with the blue connectors) hold the resistors for the permanent load and the FET's for the heater.

The back panel is almost the same as it was in the computer. Only the DIN connectors are added to connect the extruders. The wiring will be for the thermalcouple, the heatercoil and the solenoid.

And yes, I know the tag on the fan is upside down...

Lots of thanx to the men at Fablab for letting me use the lasercutter.
Wasn't there someone who tried to install a laser on a RepRap?