Open Manufacturing: A Home for the Beagle Bone #3dthursday
Check out this helpful post about how a team planned for Open Manufacturing for a project involving a BeagleBone. From IHeartRobotics:
The first thing is to frame what you want to build by constructing a list of constraints and intentions for guidance. In our case, we decided it needed to consider following:
Access to all of the ports with special consideration given to SD Card removal.
Maintaining minimal dimensions
Able to be mounted to the TurtleBot using a universal set of mounting holes.
3D Printable Design
Doing this creates the “world” that your design lives in and as such the tools you may consider using and the initial ideas for construction.
The next step is to obtain or create a 3D Cad replica of the Beagle Bone board. If one has to create their own model for testing, it’s best to note that only the major dimensions of the board and components necessary to the case are needed, but they must be accurate. These include the board itself, it’s ports, mounting holes, and anything that one may feel needs to be built around to complete the case.
Now that we have a physical and 3D model of the Beagle Bone, we can start to draw out the general outline and order of feature construction. I personally rough out a general model idea on paper and then begin creating in a CAD program of choice with the frame. Testing and experimentation are important parts of the design process. I constructed a rough case frame that wraps around the Beagle Bone and printed the piece to test the tolerances and fit. Doing this is beneficial to designers as it saves time over the long term versus running into an unaccounted error later in the process. The idea uses empirical analysis to verify quantitative and qualitative data….
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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