Fitting

After the enclosure was assembled I started to carefully drill holes using a Dremel (well, actually the cheapest version of a Dremel I could afford) into the underneath of the top plate corresponding to all the holes in the PCBs. The official Sparkfun plates are a two step process, with an assembly plate and a top plate so this is a little bit less pristine than that solution:

 

Also I had a small problem with the DC power input of the Arduino so I had to drill away a little section on the inner side of the USB side plate to get the Arduino to fit flush on the outside… oops.

 

Then I screwed in the PCB boards with screws used to hold CD or HD drives in desktops – probably not the best to use (as they didn’t fit properly and in the 4 near holes I could usually only fit 2 in diagonally):

Then it was all done… time for the reveal…

<deh nehnehneh neh neh>

<twittwoo>

  <ding>

Then plugged it in to see if it worked………………………

WOOHOOO!!!! … well not really, it didn’t work first off, during the fitting I had broken a few wires – but it was easy enough to fix so I won’t bore ye with the details.

Ok so it all works, next is to try and use it to make some music… hmm where to start….

Assembly

I’ve made all the 45 degree edge cuts to the laser-cut plates from Ponoko, now to put it all together. First we (my Dad and I) taped all the pieces in place:

Then used superglue on the inside seams and waited a day for it to dry completely:

In order to make the box totally seamless, we decided to use magnets to hold the bottom plate in place. My Dad flies model planes a good bit so we cannibalised one of the motors (very similar to a CD ROM motor) and took out all the tiny but powerful magnets from the inside the main motor hub.

Then using a spare side piece as a prop for the bottom plate we worked out where to stick the magnets (using the key hole cut outs).

I think I used about 6 of these magnet pairs in the end, any fewer than that and the bottom would fall of when you picked it up – not good! :)

Enclosure II

Ok so the MDF rushed way didn’t work very well, but I still wanted a nice seamless box so after investigating a few different options I decided to go with Ponoko and get some laser-cut acrylic. I found a little tutorial at instructables, downloaded Google SketchUp and Inkscape and made a template for my monome. It’s a little bit wasteful to be fair, but I wanted to have a few spare parts to play about with in order to get the process right. If anyone wants my design you can get it here – but be warned it won’t all click together as is there’s a lot more work to be done!

I was very impressed with what I got from Ponoko, it looked so neat! And about a million times neater than my attempt with the MDF!! Laser-cut material is usually only ever cut at 90 degrees and I needed 45 degree cuts to make my seamless box – i.e. I didn’t want any dove joints or anything like that, I just wanted the join to be on the edge of the box.

Here’s a pic of what I got from Ponoko:

With my Dad helping out (if I tried these parts on my own I wouldn’t have fingers to type this blog with) we set up a rig with a router and a table to cut the edges at 45 degrees. After a good bit of trial and error we finally got it so that it would cut away exactly at the edge give or take a few nanometres – it was very satisfying seeing the paper slightly curl up as we passed the pieces by the router. We ended up using a couple of bits of scrap metal to keep the rig as straight and level as possible – without these the wooden box had a natural dip in it from the weight of the router which would result in inconsistent edges. You could of course hire a proper router table but where’s the fun in that? Here’s a close up of the setup:

Here’s a pass of the top plate:

 

And a corner of the bottom plate with 2 45 degree cuts (see how it’s going to come together yet?):

We stuck the side pieces together to do them all in one pass (one has a laser cut hole for the usb port):

Now all the plates have 45 degree cuts on all their edges, next step is to stick them all together…