Power Supply (PSU) Bracket Customizations by dewhisna

Last crawled date: 2 years, 12 months ago

This project started off with my work on rebuilding my MaxNC-15 CNC Milling Machine. I gutted the old electronics and am installing a Protoneer RPi-CNC and Raspberry Pi to drive it, along with new stepper motors and a bigger power supply. These, I'm mounting to a 1x8 piece of plywood that I am going to bolt to the back of the CNC machine in place of where the original electronics box was located. I needed a way to mount the 36V power supply to the plywood and that began my work with these brackets.
I found this original power supply bracket, but it was about 1mm too narrow to fit my power supply without bowing the clips significantly. Also, I thought to make use of the M4 screw holes on the bottom of the power supply to bolt it to the bracket instead of relying on the friction and springiness of the clips to hold it in place.
So, I wanted to remix it a bit and add 1mm extra distance on the inside and add screw holes that I could bolt the power supply to the bracket. And I also needed the ability to offset those mounting holes to accommodate the terminal cover I had already printed for the power supply. For doing this, I created an OpenSCAD project that imported the original STL and added customizations to easily tweak and add features for things I wanted modified.
Then after printing that, which worked really well, I decided that space-wise on my wood panel, it would be better to rotate the power supply to its side instead. So I added some more customizations to the OpenSCAD code to rotate the base to be one of the clips and move the mounting holes accordingly.
As-is, there's about half-a-dozen different directly renderable configurations in the OpenSCAD code. Simply change the 'RenderType' variable to 0, 1, 2, or 3 (as commented in the code). You can also change the 'RemoveClips' boolean variable to completely remove the clips on the normal base configuration if you want to use only the bottom screw holes to hold it to the power supply (since the clips aren't actually needed in that configuration). And you can change the offset side to be either the inside or the outside by setting the 'OffsetInside' boolean variable, which is useful for the side-mount configuration.
You can easily add/remove extra distance between the clips by the 'ExtraClipDist' variable and you can change the base thickness via the 'ExtraThickness' variable to accommodate counter-boring of the mounting holes. And you can easily set the screw hole diameter and counter bore depth and diameter for both the outside bracket mounting holes and the bottom mounting holes.
I have not, however, added any customizations for the clip height nor for using countersunk screws instead of counter-bored. But, you can easily tweak the OpenSCAD code to add those.
Also, if you are wondering what cover I'm using in the pictures, it's an unmodified print of https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:526278 which fits this power supply very nicely (my make). And the 36V 10A (360W) power supply, I got from stepperonline on eBay.
For printing these, I printed them in ABS at 35% infill (there actually isn't much difference between, 25%, 30%, and 35% on these). I did use supports inside the holes to make them come out a little better, which you can pop out by pushing a screw through them after printing. But, it will print OK without any supports.
Note: I did not enable the online 'Customizer' app for this because that online app doesn't work correctly with importing and modifying an existing STL file in OpenSCAD code, as you can see in the "preview" image of the OpenSCAD file there in the posted file thumbnails. So to customize this, you'll have to download the files and run it on a locally installed copy of OpenSCAD.
UPDATE (13 Nov 2017) : I added V2 of PSU Bracket OpenSCAD that allows for the clip length to be easily altered via new 'ExtraClipLength' variable. See the discussion in the comments tab.