Here’s a fascinating follow up to the Home for the Beagle Bone Part 1 post — an honest application of the 80/20 rule to discuss major issues discovered with the designs shared in the previous post. From iHeartRobotics:

The 80/20 rule supposes that 80% of your results comes from 20% of the work you did. It has further been argued that the last 20% of a project is the most difficult and important. One can understand how these two ideas tie together and they indeed have some sort of merit. Those last few stages in preparing to bring a product to market/project to close are critical because the details are important. The last post ended with the Beagle Bone Case being at the 80% stage. The design language and major features have been settled. Now is the time to take the case and sort out imperfections, adjustments for changes in new/changed constraints, cost effective production and so forth. Basically, the iteration and revision of a design in the stages prior to being salable.

In this case, additional feature requests were made that changed core parts of the design. Room needed to be added to accommodate an additional shield or board, as well as any wiring. This resulted in the case being expanded 10mm on the sides and increasing the height by 18mm. Time was also taken at this stage to refine existing features. The SD Card port was enlarged for easier access and the press-fit to close system improved alongside adding Greebling to the case top. This version of the Beagle Bone Case was then 3D Printed.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with the case as designed; it takes over 5hrs 30min to complete in addition to suffering from curling due to its new size. Internally, a design that takes longer than 180-225min to 3D print is no longer affordable to offer as a product. The time removes full 3D printing as an option for manufacturing after including the cost of running the 3D Printer and man power.

Read more.

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!