| name | value |
| description | as my first Comrade Circuits product. |
I am currently working on making pi hole kits for folks in my community who requested that I offer something like this.
I found a cool kit I could work with from Adafruit, but when ordering I thought the display would sit flush with the enclosure. There is a small gap between the display and the enclosure, and it's too easy to unintentionally knock and damage the display. The folks I serve are largely people who are intimidated by technology, and so I think a small amount of abstraction would make the product more approachable and accessible. Many of the people I serve have mobilities that are often in the blind spots of designers and engineers.
This is my first go at this, so my goals are
- make an enclosure where the person can access the pins while not accidentally knocking out the display.
- make it so that it can be opened for occasional cleaning.
- balance dust prevention with aeration.
I first tried FreeCAD, but it's UI is admittedly overwhelming and mind-numbing. I can handle this with references or sincere interest in a product, but I couldn't find much of either in me. I found a lot of content related to Blender, another open source product that is free. Those are my favorite kinds of products.
Blender is capable of a lot, too much in my case, so I decided to descend into the land of YouTube tutorials to tinker with some of the concepts I had envisioned. How difficult are they to implement?
Kevandram on YouTube has a video that I found myself referencing several times over regarding concepts like positioning objects individually and in relation to one another, making planes (e.g. walls), and using boolean modifiers to carve out designs in objects.
I ended up stumbling on TinkerCAD and found it infinitely easier than Blender and was able to spin this up in a couple of days using this project as a starting point:
Now it's time to actually print it. These will be my first projects on the machine I own, so I need to actually set it up. Because I purchased it refurbished online, it did not come with a manual.
This Youtube video should help me out:
