Show HN: EnclosureGenerator - make PCBA enclosures fast

enclosuregenerator.com

7 points·enclosure_guy··5 comments

Hey HN!

This is a website I made for generating simple prototype enclosures for circuit boards. In a previous job I often had to make a lot of simple prototype enclosures for different projects, and I felt like the process should be a little more automated, so I built this.

The site is still in a pretty early stage (in other words the duct tape and gum holding it together may fall apart at any moment), but check it out and let me know what you think!

Looks useful -- Out of curiosity, how do you determine where to place holes in the sidewalls or sockets for the board to screw into?

For the side wall mounting holes it is pretty simple, it just looks for the outline of the PCBA you are making an enclosure for, and then makes sets of holes spaced evenly, offset from the outline. I'm planning on making that a lot more customizable as well as have smarter defaults. Right now the hole placement does not take into account things like cutouts for connectors, which can be important.

The PCBA mounting holes are created based on the positions of drill holes in the IDF file, compared to a given hole size threshold that the user sets.

This looks very interesting, I can think of a few times that I would have used a tool like this. I am an electrical engineer who knows only enough CAD to be dangerous.

Thanks! I don't think that CAD tools will ever go away, but I also think there is plenty of room for purpose-built tools that abstract away some of the CAD know-how needed to make simple things.

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