Monday, 23 March 2020

Power Supplies #1

I looked at the scruffy way I had mounted the little power supply on the back of the boards and realised there was a much better way of doing the job.

I had a 3D printer and I could simply print a box to contain the whole thing neatly.
And I could put mounting points on it and make the cable and DC plug for the Arduino Uno part of the whole thing. They might even come in handy for other things so I'll need four but I'll build five because it's so easy when you have a fabrication process at your beck and call isn't it?
It all started well, I had already installed my preferred design software when I bought my first 3D printer a few years previously. 
I had designed and printed a lot of simple things very successfully on it and was very fond of it but it had one major drawback, it used the larger, 3mm, filament.

So, a couple of years previously, I bought a cheap but very nice Chinese clone of a RepRap and had more success with that.
That was what I would use to make my power supply cases.

Well, I made three of my cases and began to realise what I had let myself in for. The printer was fine but my design was lacking in detail. I tried to improve the detail only to find that the printer wasn't able to do some of the things I was asking of it. It just wasn't accurate enough.

About then, I read a magazine article comparing various 3D printers and pointing out their good and bad points. The one that really stood out was a Prusa i3MK3s. It actually came top in two sections so I had a much closer look at it online. I'm not here to sell you one so I won't go into detail but I realised that this was the one for me. I ordered it and, shortly thereafter, it duly arrived. 

I fed in the same file I'd had only moderate success with before and it printed perfectly, first time. The "First time" bit is quite important as I have a box full of failed prints from before then.


So the last two power supply cases got printed and they were really good.

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