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Jazz up your Project with an Extruded Aluminum Enclosure

scottiebabe

Unbeknownst to the reader, this project is actually a $4 piece of junk. At a casual glance, you may be tempted to believe it is boutique product.

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Ooh ahh, fancy. I purchased one of these extruded aluminum enclosure from a local seller.

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Photos curtesy of this product listing: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33053448840.html

I cut 2 pieces of bare copper clad board to fit within the PCB mounting channels of the enclosure.

I used my Dremel to drill 4 mounting holes aligned to 4 ground pins on the edge connectors of the Pico.

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I don’t use the drill press stand attachment to my Dremel enough to have a strong opinion about it. There are fancier model making precision drill presses, but I already have this so I use it.

The Pico soldered to a carrier card

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To machine out the microUSB connector slot, I first a put a piece of blue tape on the enclosure endplate and made an impression of the connector.

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I then drilled and filled the slot large enough such that the USB connector could slide right through.

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Not perfect, but close enough for my standards.

Similar process for the SMA connectors.

The 2 pushbuttons were a very long and tedious process. I drilled the holes first and then tried to solder the buttons to match the holes. I used what I had at hand, but this process could be avoided entirely using proper pushbutton and a custom PCB. But, in the end I got it to fit together fairly well.

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The second prototype card

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It is just an amplifier/buffer using a screaming fast hex logic inverter.

In the end I have a little CW signal generator capable of tuning from DC to 200 MHz and provides an output power of ~13.5 dBm into 50 Ohms.

Conclusion

The end result looks fabulous on the exterior.

Locating and machining the cutouts for the USB connector and SMA connector were relatively easy.

There is ample room for prototype style construction and a RPI Pico.

Using this style of enclosure is a lot more work as apposed to loosely tossing everything in a box and using panel mount connectors and interface elements. Wherever you drilled the hole, is where the connector ends up.

If your going to go to the trouble of making a custom PCB, you could make a printable drill template for the endplates. Or spend even more and order custom endplates using a PCB or aluminum.

Happy tinkering!

  • in reply to ggabe

    Its in  favorite language, python. 

    Someone did a nice job using a Si5351 synth chip

    image

    https://ve2zaz.net/Si5351_Synth/Si5351_Synth.htm 

    They went to the trouble of making a PCB, but a breakout module could be also be used.

  • in reply to scottiebabe

       said:"Its in  ;favorite language, python," LOL, NAY, NAY, Fibber you know I hate Python. It reminds me of FORTRAN, BASIC!! YUCK! This crap about indexing the levels, and the ware is the semi-colon?? This stupid idiot took the {, }, and the semicolon and took them out!!

    This now becomes the last programming language I will use. No wait a second COBAL! Wait I will toss into the ring of hell with PASCAL and BASIC.

    FOTRAN, and APL, are necessary evils but then neat when you need them.

    Let us not forget about PERL, It does one thing well web pages! But it has many problems, first, it's typeless that is to say no INTS, FLOATS. Second, the stupid $ before the var name! Third, the PERL location. every xxxxxx.perl file needs to know where perl is #!/usr/bin/perl and by the way it's not always in the same place! dito for CPAN!

    Note: Phoenix Trading website which is down for a while, has over 50 maybe 75 pages which have to be updated for starters. Please don't get me wound up...

    NOW what language do I write in most of the time: C, Perl, or JAVA which I am trying to learn. I also use the Ardunio C-ish thing called Sketch which is written in C++. But I don't use void loop instead use int main(), in this way, I can return a value to halt, or something failed! So only one name.ino and the rest are just names.c with names.h for each of the names.c files.

  • in reply to phoenixcomm
    phoenixcomm said:
    But I don't use void loop instead use int main(), in this way, I can return a value to halt, or something failed! So only one name.ino and the rest are just names.c with names.h for each of the names.c files.

    This time I am not going to answer on this Wink

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

      Jan, Yes that is what I said. and the programs work! As you know main() is defined so I use it. The thing is you have to do some dirty code to exit your program. As I am writing a system that is in an aircraft, so if something fails or does not start I get a message and put the message in the log, and then I can figure out what I want to do next. sometimes fail, or exit, this returns to the code value and exits the program and there is only one way to get out... Because the void loop() construct does not allow for a gracious exit! ~~ Cris see below: if the value is minus then the return happens. is 

    int main(){

    if ( int value < 0 )  { 

        return int value; }

    // maybe more code}