Another Aluminum Case for Arduino

I apologize for the self-promotion, but I am the process of making an aluminum case for Arduino. I am working on a simple weather monitoring setup that uses a series of 1-wire DS18B20 temperature sensors along with Adafruit's BMP085 barometric sensor and Sparkfun's HIH-4030 humidity sensor. Everything is connected to an ethernet shield that publishes the sensor data which is then parsed by a Debian/linux box and the data written into sql server.

Anyway, I needed a way to mount the Arduino and that's how the TuxCASE for Arduino got started. I made a few of them and if anyone is interested, the details are at,

http://thecuriouspenguin.com/detail?id=15

All suggestions and feedbacks are appreciated.

thanks,

Geez, self-promoting is what this sub-forum is all about!

I am concerned that your box doesn't show standoffs. With bare pin terminals on the bottom of Arduino and metal casing, you would short the board if you try to screw it directly to the case. Also, how many of your 4-40 screw can actually be tightened to the board without hitting components that are placed too close to the holes? Maybe two out of four? Not your fault if this happens.

We thought about using standoffs, but we are trying to keep the retail price bellow $24.95usd and standoffs are a bit expensive. We buy most of our supplies from McMaster and the 4-40 standoffs are around $1usd each.

We decided to machine the standoffs into the case because we can actually shorten the height, to 0.15" and decrease the mounting hole platform radius to 0.08" as oppose to 0.11" for the smallest 3/16" brass standoffs, while reducing the cost. With 0.15" of bottom clearance and .08" mounting hole platform radius, we haven't encountered short circuit problems with the Uno R3, R2 and Duemilanove boards.

However, you are right regarding the crowded component placement on the Arduino board. On the R3, the hole closes to the reset pin is right next the a couple headers, but we can easily secure the R3 using the other 3 mounting holes.

I put nylon washers under screwheads and above metal standoffs to prevent the metal from accidentally contacting anything on the board.

Thanks CrossRoads,

To be on the safe side, we will look into the nylon washers.

thanks,