After a few months of work, the case for my calculator is finally finished. Back in January I made a post with a picture of the clad I soldered together for the case. My plan at the time was to stuff all of the internals of the calculator into the case over the course of a few days but it ended up taking much longer.
The first hurdle was figuring out how to attach the front and back plates to the case. In the end I settled on epoxy. The first one I tried was still oily after 24 hours and did not hold very well but a much cheaper one held extremely well and I used it to glue four bolts to either side of the case body. Oddly enough the epoxy turned the clad green pretty quickly. From there I made holes with a box cutter in the front and back pieces for the bolts. Cutting out the hole for the keypad and LCD in the front piece of clad with a box cutter and wire cutters was a real chore and I don't plan on working with clad ever again without something like a dremel. For spacers between the clad and components I used rubber erasers.
These are cheap and easy to work with. My only fear is that they may dry out and crack someday. At first I tried gluing one of the plastic battery holders to an eraser with epoxy but surprisingly the bond was very weak. Super glue worked very well, though, and I glued in more erasers to hold the LCD, PCB, and keypad in place. All of that added a noticeable amount of weight to everything. The front and back pieces also have erasers glued to them to help hold everything together.
There was not enough room to comfortably route the wires from the LCD and keypad to the PCB so I desoldered them and used Cat5 cable instead. The wires inside are much smaller and easier to work with. It is also possible to leave the individual wires inside the Cat5 cable to make routing neater and I did this for some of the keypad wires. After assembling everything it worked fairly well except the keypad buttons were hooked up upside down. This was easy to fix in software and I loaded the new version using the programming pins soldered to the PCB without having to take the PCB out of the case. There was another bug that caused the calculator to freeze after pressing escape. For some reason the program was going into sleep mode when I pressed escape. I must have added this during debugging but it does not make sense at this point.
The next step will be to add some sort of labels for the keys and then paint it if I decide to.
These are cheap and easy to work with. My only fear is that they may dry out and crack someday. At first I tried gluing one of the plastic battery holders to an eraser with epoxy but surprisingly the bond was very weak. Super glue worked very well, though, and I glued in more erasers to hold the LCD, PCB, and keypad in place. All of that added a noticeable amount of weight to everything. The front and back pieces also have erasers glued to them to help hold everything together.
There was not enough room to comfortably route the wires from the LCD and keypad to the PCB so I desoldered them and used Cat5 cable instead. The wires inside are much smaller and easier to work with. It is also possible to leave the individual wires inside the Cat5 cable to make routing neater and I did this for some of the keypad wires. After assembling everything it worked fairly well except the keypad buttons were hooked up upside down. This was easy to fix in software and I loaded the new version using the programming pins soldered to the PCB without having to take the PCB out of the case. There was another bug that caused the calculator to freeze after pressing escape. For some reason the program was going into sleep mode when I pressed escape. I must have added this during debugging but it does not make sense at this point.
The next step will be to add some sort of labels for the keys and then paint it if I decide to.
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