Previous articles:
part 1 – part 2 – part 3 – part 4
Progress!
I’ve done a ton of work on the handheld over the past few days. I actually did mock something up in Inventor, even though I said I didn’t want to learn any new CAD/CAM programs anymore…
I really needed the parametric functionality in order to go ahead, so I bit the bullet on this one. Turns out it wasn’t all that hard. I’m by no means saying I am an Inventor expert now, but hey, I managed to design this little piece:
So instead of the case being 2 halves meeting in the middle, I redesigned the whole thing and came up with the idea of a back shell that holds all the parts, and covering it all up with a nice and shiny black acrylic front panel. I then cut another testpiece to get a sense of scale and ergonomy. Feels great to be honest.
I managed to trim off some of the witdh, compared to the previous version.
Then, I did a lot of measuring components, and figuring out where everything could go. And I designed the inside accordingly.
The inside was 2.5D milled using an elaborate setup of 2D geometry I came up with. The backside is a 3D operation based on the STL I exported from Inventor.
The bamboo stock I had was 5mm too thin, so I glued on some nice rosewood for the sake of contrast. This will eventually only form a darker ring on a light bamboo backcover piece.
Milling wasn’t without issues, with different woods & different grain directions, multiple tool changes and 2-sided alignment to consider.
Eventually I took it very conservative and ended up with a pretty nice result after about 5 hours.
Testfitting the screen and speakers, it all seems to fit in nicely.
2 thoughts on “FEZ – Frederico Entertainment Zystem (5) – Back cover”