Duet Wifi controller box attaches to 2020 extrusion by Rexipus

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a control box for mounting a Duet Wifi board on a 3D printer or other machine that uses 2020 aluminum extrusions.
This originally started out as a remix of Greg24's Duet Wifi mount/cover here:http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1920401
The further along I went, the more extensive the modifications I made, and I ran into issues as I converted it from a box with a removable bottom to a box with a removable top instead, and in the end I just started over from scratch. Everything about my box is a little different, including the dimensions, the nature of the holes for the cables coming in, how I mount the board, how I envision the airflow through the box (I have extensive venting on the opposite side from the fans and a solid lid), etc. I also added a mounting rail onto the side of this box that allows it to be screwed down to a 2020 extrusion.
I didn't put any holes into the corner chamfer of the ledge around the top, for securing the lid. This is because I leave it to the user to choose what sort of fastener they want to use. It's trivial to just drill holes through the lid into that chamfer for whatever size/shape of screw you decide to use.
This is incomplete in one way: I have screw blocks for securing the plastic cable conduit inside the mounting box. I haven't designed the matching plastic pieces that would actually screw down onto these, but now that I've started installing my box in my D-bot, the plastic conduit fits tight enough that I'm not sure the plastic pieces for securing the conduit are strictly necessary. I may not bother.
As an homage to Greg24's box, I am including an alternate lid that I snipped from his original Duet Wifi mount, that preserves his diagonal vents, but whose dimensions will allow it to be used as the lid for my box.
Again: the alternate lid with the diagonal vents is in fact snipped directly out of Greg24's original Solidworks sources for his box.
Right now I don't recommend that the vented lid be used, because it might result in not enough airflow under the Duet Wifi board, and that's where a majority of the heat is dissipated from the stepper driver chips and the power mosfets. With my solid lid the airflow will go straight from the 40mm fans across the Duet Wifi board (both sides) and out through the vents in the front face of the box.
Update 13 March 2017: I just added a new version of the controller box that has four 12mm holes (fits 1/2" plastic conduit) on the back side, the side with the two fans. This is because as I progressed with my D-bot build I realized that the most sensible wiring for my printer had more wires and cables coming into the back of the box than I'd anticipated. For the sake of neatness in routing conduits from different places on the printer all the way up to the control box, and to keep those wires separated by function at their entry into the box, four holes simply made more sense.