The Arduino Smart Watch Part 4: 3D Printing An Enclosure

The completed design

I had to take a little break from the Arduino Smart Watch Project in order to build a 3D printer that I used to build the enclosure. Now that the printer is complete here is my progress of prototyping with a 3D printer for the first time. 

This was the first attempt I made at 3D printing an enclosure for my watch. At this point it's really just a box to get the dimensions right. It has cutouts for the button, micro usb charging port, power switch and programming port. 

In part because I was new to 3D printing, and in part because I rushed the measurements, it took me 4 prints in order to get everything to where I want it to be. The changes were minor, like extending the case by 2mm, or moving the switch cutout 1mm in one or the other direction. 

Once I had the dimensions down I added strap mounts. They were less painful to print than I anticipated. I already had a watch strap around so designing mounts around it was straight forward. I ended up creating simple rectangles with 1x1x1mm depressions for the pins in the straps. 

Here I have the electronics mounted with the watch strap. The next step was to print a lid for the watch.

And voila, the final-ish enclosure for the watch. As of now, the enclosure is attached with a few strips of tape (as I needed to fix a bad soldering joint on the inside). The next step would be to add a hinge and or some latches to snap on the top. As far as this basic version of the watch goes, this is going to be the final progress blog. The next blogs will go over the plans for new internals featuring bluetooth, an accelerator and most likely a custom PCB.

Below I am including a galery of all the process pictures I took along the way!

https://goo.gl/photos/dE9h2AQMMkwaAht1A

P.S. I am also going to post the links to my code and 3D models in the next blog.