Shapeways and SketchUp, a maker's friend

So we bought this cheap-o lamp years ago - little florescent tube on the end of a plastic jointed neck, nothing special.  It was one of those "touch lamps" - instead of a mechanical electrical switch, it had a capacitive switch, the kind with a little metal nub that you touch and it uses the capacitance of your body to trigger the switch.  You know the ones.

Anyway, the crummy plastic housing broke about a year into its life, and of course I think to myself "well, I'm not going to throw out a perfectly good working circuit like that," so I scavenged the circuit board and the flourescent tube assembly, and stowed it away for a future project.

Recently, I got to thinking about that lamp circuit, and started roughing out some designs, and realized that before I could get very far I'd need an enclosure for the bare circuit board so that I could then put the whole affair into a mortise in the base or something.  But where to get a suitable enclosure?  I looked all over the place for an off-the-shelf project box, but they were all either way too big or just enough too small for my needs - I wanted the minimum amount of space to house this thing to allow for as much latitude as possible in the design.  What I really needed was a custom enclosure designed to JUST fit the board and components, isolating it from its surroundings, and allowing for the wires that needed to come out of it for the tubes, the power cord, and the touch switch.

Enter SketchUp and, ultimately, shapeways.com.  For those who don't already know, SketchUp is a very simple yet powerful (and free!) 3D modeling application (you can get it from sketchup.com - the free version is plenty functional for most purposes, including this one).  Taking exact measurements of the circuit board (including the power cord strain relief, holes for the mounting screws, etc.), I created a simple box with the ports, stand-offs, and recesses to just exactly hold the circuit board and provide clearance for the wires.  Here's what it looked like:

Simple enough, right?

So how to make this a reality? Enter shapeways.com.  Shapeways is a website front end to a 3D printing shop that makes custom forms to order in a number of materials, including a kind of nylon plastic.   They take a number of 3D model formats, including one that SketchUp natively exports, and in a couple of weeks voila!  

My box showed up today, and apart from a minor defect in the snap-together tabs which turned out to be a defect in the exported file, it was exactly to spec.  The material is also easy to machine, so if you want to leave some details to "post-production" (like I did with the drilling of screw holes in the standoffs) it works fine.

Here's the box, with the circuit board installed:

Cozy, no?  I had to shorten the power cord wires and re-solder them (the strain relief isn't moveable on the wires), but everything fits exactly into the little notches, and the screws went into the drilled posts perfectly.

Now instead of a mess of components and wires to deal with, I just have to account in my design for a mortise to hold this:

In the interest of full disclosure, this wasn't cheap - it ended up costing about $70 after shipping etc. - but I figured that it was an okay investment in an experiment, and was cheaper than a lot of other ways of producing a single unit of a custom design in plastic.  Also note: it does say on the site that the material is "for decorative purposes only" - so they don't vouch for using it in this context.  If you do something like this, then like me, you are doing so at your own risk.

All things considered, I'm calling it a success, if only because it made possible a much more professional result than I would have been able to get from off the shelf products, and learning how easy it was to get from digital to physical was pretty cool.

Once the lamp is done, I'll post pictures.