The "Massive Adafruit Arcade Button" is one of my favorites, I just find it comically large. Therefore whenever I get a chance to specify this particular button, I jump at it.
As luck would have it, I am building a project for an event the company I now work for is holding. I will write about the Python and Pi side after the event, but today I put together the enclosure, and I think for the laser cutter owners, it might come in handy.
I cut it out on 3mm baltic birch plywood and I also cut an extra top in black acrylic, which I think looks a little nicer and goes with the black screen enclosure I am using.
For this project I used my new laser, the Glowforge (review coming soon), and like my K40, it accepts SVG files. You can find the SVG document at Thingiverse here.
While the file I used for cutting was the SVG, the project started life as a Fusion 360 CAD design.
To ensure everything would fit together, the model is made up of 3mm thick walls. Tabs are drawn into the sketches, and I used the split body tool to use a wall or the roof as a cutting tool to ensure each piece "cut" into the next.
For the vector files I finished with creating new sketches from each face and exporting them as DXF.
A few mistakes I made that you will surely avoid:
- I used an Adobe Illustrator template someone in the Glowforge community shared to ensure my layout would fit on the bed, but forgot to set it to metric. A quick bit of scaling math put me on track.
- There was an opportunity to use some scrap acrylic but I made the design just too big. Next time I will work backwards from the material if that is an option. Fortunately it fit together first time.
- "To save time" I didn't build the design using parametric variables (eg. "thickness" rather than specifying 3mm). Now it is harder to repurpose in future for different materials. D'oh.
Despite those mistakes I think it came out pretty well. I just hope it survives the trip to Texas!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://makerhacks.com/laser-cut-box-for-the-massive-adafruit-arcade-button/
Nicely done!
I can't wait to read your review on Glowforge "3D Laser Printer". I think I saw its promotional videos... like a year or two ago. Probably from the Kickstarter campaign... It looks amazing, just as if it were an Apple product... And I think it had some unique features like wireless capabilities and a camera or some sort of scanner to help position the stock material... The question is - Does it work well? It would be interesting if you could test it against trusty old K40 :)
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