Monday, April 18, 2016

Mini ITX 3D Printer case

April 18, 2016
I finally sat down and made some updates to my mini itx design. I have now put my old hardware into the case I had laying around and found the front to be a bit on the thin side. It was also a bit tight, just how I designed it, but I decided it was time for a version two. I gave myself another 10 mm on the front of the case. I also made the side walls a bit thicker. Although this will add even more time to the print time, I feel much better about the design now. I managed to break the front trying to fit in one of the buttons and that's just not something I want to happen. So I had to make some changes on all the large parts which is still within the bed size. The width is still under 200 mm which is what my bed is but this is still cutting it close and the length is still way under the 250 mm of the bed. The only problem with these large parts is the lifting of the corners. But glue seems to be working okay. Unfortunately my printer is still not printing so great. I did another two day print and the side walls where not sticking so great not to mention extremely thin in some places. Aside from printer problems and cad software problems, it's slowly getting there. I'm calling this one version 2. I've also made a few other minor changes  to the side panels on the bottom. I'm still working my way up so the bottom needs to be perfect because I'm now also using it as my computer case. I'm hoping these will be the biggest changes I need to make so I can concentrate on other things. If you want to see the video I have on this, just go to youtube and look for 3d printed nas case to get an idea of what it looks like once printed. It's the same case, this one will just be a little longer to give me a tiny bit more space inside. The first one works just fine, but I decided to make all the changes since I wanted to fix the walls anyway.


2 comments:

Jason Wong said...

Have you ever tried to create one for 8x 3.5in Bay or maybe 12x 2.5in bay ?

JV said...

After looking for the 8 bay nas case I did think about using two of the drive cages (the purple section in the picture above) stacked up. It will take some re-work but I think it could be doable. This way I won't have to start all over with a new design and just try to re-use that purple section if I can. The only problem with this is the power supply. Most thin psu's only have a few connections, the larger ones are as big as the case itself. This is the biggest challenge with adding more drives form what I can tell unfortunately and why I may not even do it, at least not yet. There's just no easy way to get one in this case other than adding it to the side. With two of those stacked up it may be just too tall, but anything is possible. I also have to limit the large prints to the height of the tallest part you see on the picture due to time of the print and going taller just adds more potential for the part failing to print. So this is the tallest I want to go. The design and the parts are practically done, I just need to get the printer going again. If the printer is not up to the task, I can't get a decent print to test fitment, etc. So this makes for a very slow process but I'm still hacking at this a little bit at a time.