A customer sent this in to us, so we thought we’d help them out with a post! Hunter writes…
Recently I had purchased a Netduino Plus from you guys for a project at work and I ran into the problem of not finding an enclosure that was a good fit for our application. We build automation machinery and give mechanical/electrical design consulting to manufactures and various DoD departments, so I was trying to find something that looks professional and can mount to a standard DIN rail … well I never did find anything, so I designed my own.
Tired of hand making your project enclosures out of shoe boxes and tin cans? … If you’re looking for a professional grade enclosure to fit microcontrollers using an Arduino or Netduino footprint, then we have a solution – we call it the OstovBox from Hunter Automation. It’s made of black ABS platic with customizable 6061-T6 brushed Aluminum end plates so you can retrofit the enclosure for whatever your wiring needs call for, but it comes standard with 1 blank end plate and 1 end plate for the Netduino Plus model. The concept for this enclosure came from our need to mount a Netduino Plus into an industrial electrical panel DIN 35mm rail … after much searching, we finally gave up and designed our own. The “fully loaded” version comes with a 3.8″x2.5″ prototyping board, dual 12 position external screw teminals for clean wiring, and a snap on/off DIN 35 mounting bracket – this version will set you back about $87 but if you don’t need all the bells-and-whistles, you can can configure the options to just the enclosure and end plates for about $44 and if you need to add options in the future you can purchase them separately. Also, the prototyping board was sized around the standard ExpressPCB board for those of you who want to design you’re own circuits boards – the board layout and dimensions you’ll need to include in your design can be found in the datasheet.