Before I can work on the front panel design of Enzo’s Activity Board, I need to know the exact dimensions. This can be figured out either by using some math, or by simply just measuring it. I choose the latter, but this means I first need to build the box that holds everything in place …
I still had some pieces of 9 mm thick plywood laying around. Since one of the pieces had a depth of 14 cm, that quickly became the desired depth of the box.
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As an avid watcher of many woodworking YouTube channels, I knew the best approach would be cutting box joints. But unfortunately I don’t have a table saw, I don’t have a box joint jig and my name isn’t Matthias Wandel.
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Luckily the old fashioned hand saw did work as well. Cutting a piece to length really isn’t that much of a hassle.
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Without all the fancy tools, I opted to go for the nail and glue approach and botched up a simple square box. To quote my father: “Wood filler works wonders!”
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With a sigh of relief it turned out to fit in the Ikea Kallax cabinet. As you can see I have a few millimeters of room left, which is on purpose. I eventually want to finish of the box with an aluminum L-profile.
The back of the box is just a square piece of wood which is currently held in place by friction. It will be the divider between the fancy looking guts, and the ugly looking wiring in the back.
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Of course, this box need some magic light effects, so the next step is to add a few NeoPixels. With 4 strips of 18 LED’s and some double sided tape, I went to work.
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Pieces of solid core wire connect the four strips together. A piece of cake for my beautiful new soldering iron!
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An Arduino Nano is sacrificed for testing the NeoPixels. A little piece of advice here: if you work with NeoPixels, you are advised to add a huge ass capacitor on the power line, and a current limiting resistor on the data line. But since I was a bit impatient to give it a try, I took my chances.
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After checking if everything worked as planned, I used a few dabs of hot glue to keep the wires in place, and prevent any possible short circuits.
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Even after the hot glue it kept on working. This must be my lucky day!
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With the back plate temporarily in place, It already starts to look like a fun little magic box. I really can’t wait to see Enzo’s reaction when it’s finished. Somewhere in 2033.