Our PCBs greatly benefit from cases – what’s with all the pins that can be accidentally shorted, connectors that stick out of the outline, and cables pulling the board into different directions. Designing a case for your PCB might feel like a fair bit of effort – but it likely isn’t, thanks to projects like turbocase from [Martijn Braam].
This script generates simple and elegant OpenSCAD cases for your KiCad PCBs – you only need to draw a few extra lines in the PCB Editor, that’s it. It makes connector openings, too – add a “Height” property to your connector footprints to have them be handled automatically. Oh, and there’s a few quality-of-life features – if your project has mounting holes, the script will add threaded-insert-friendly standoffs to the case; yet another argument for adding mounting holes to your boards, in case you needed more.
Installing the script is a single line, running it is merely another, and that will cover an overwhelming majority of boards out there; the code is all open too, of course. Want some more customization? Here’s some general project enclosure tutorials for OpenSCAD, and a KiCad-friendly StepUp tutorial. Oh, and of course, there’s many more ways to enclose PCBs – our own [Bob Baddeley] has written a guide to project enclosures that you are bound to learn new things from.
We thank [adistuder] for sharing this with us!
Martijn Braam, I know who that is. He’s very active in the pine community. Super friendly guy. He is/was a part of the pinetab team, if my memory serves me right. He helped me get my pinetab up and running so I could play with it.
yesss it’s a pleasure to cover a project of his!
He also created the Linux phone camera app Megapixels!
I knew I remembered his name: he was experimenting with audio mixing with a Teensy!
https://blog.brixit.nl/digital-audio-mixer-pt-2/
Good that this solution does not rely on Fusion360 !
good old OpenSCAD 🥰
It is what I plan to do fore 3 years… My respect!
A statistic that is skewed when you consider devs and the target audience. The Linux % is certainly way higher than 6.
Arya has a fixation with things being open source, as if nothing closed-source could ever be featured on HaD
You are far, far more likely to have your project featured on Hackaday if it is open source. We don’t have a ban on closed source projects here, but we absolutely avoid them when possible.
Good!
I mean, a hack is a hack, am I right?
Hacker culture is a culture of sharing.
You are completely right here. But it still doesn’t mean one should penalize closed source content. I don’t want to see more closed source stuff, I am just saying.
if a hack is open-source, it’s usually just that much more interesting to our readers, purely from the perspective of what it lets them do. It’s really cool that people can learn from what we cover, and hack on what we cover.
It’s Hack a day, not sales pitch a day.
Buying a locked-down product that you aren’t even allowed to see how it works isn’t exactly a hack.
“Hack” and “open source” are not necessarily synonyms, as far as I understand it. You can hack an Alexa, which is not open source, and not even open source your hack, just show the result of it.
You can only show the result of it, indeed, but would that be in the hacker spirit?
In addition to what others said, a project being open-source means we can learn from it, modify it, reuse it, and a number of other things – which does make closed-source projects inferior for our readers, as if by definition! However, if you need to see me feature a closed-source project this badly, just see the article before the previous one ;-)
KiCad and OpenSCAD are both cross platform applications and run on Win, Mac and Linux. Everyone gets to play!
Python also runs on windows, I don’t see a problem.
Great to see this pop up on my feed. I just spend all day optimizing the scad model for the 18650 holder and released turbocase 1.6. This adds a bunch of extra parts in a KiCad library to add to the generated case.
yaaaay, well done! thank you for sharing your project with us!