I was watching EEVblog’s video about searching for an project box.
I think I can figure out how to search for that now. But I guess my real question is about what people use these for. Why use a project box instead of a 3D printed enclosure? Isn’t that better?
Personally I don’t have access to a 3D printer yet so I either have to find something that will work for me or one time I got a local sign company to cut out a “Sick of Beige” type case for me, but it was a huge pain.
I think it comes down to what you want to spend your time on. Right now for me working on the electronics is the fun part and I’d rather spend more time on that than having a perfect enclosure.
I think in the scheme of things cases filled the gap before 3D printung has become a household word. These case provide mechanical strength as well as their material providing protection from the weather or i.e. heat, moisture and or UV as needed.
I don’t doubt 3D printing materials have come a long way and will continue to improve. At the moment I am with @ALeggeUp - I have enough to get going with the electronics to be spening time in front of a CAD … At the moment.
If I’m building a quick prototype, it’s nice to just grab an off the shelf case to get things off the ground. Like @ALeggeUp said, it gives you more time to focus on getting the electronics nailed down first. I remember this cool video Dave posted a while back where he used the pcb as a front panel to his case. I thought that was pretty slick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg_J9WElvBY. Or I’ve seen people who design the entire case with pcbs: http://hackaday.com/2015/06/03/how-to-build-beautiful-enclosures-from-fr4-aka-pcbs/.
There’s also these cool 3D printer sharing services that you can essentially pay people with 3D printers to print your item and ship it to you like 3dhubs.com or makexyz.com. The nice thing about this is that someone else can take care of maintaining the printer and troubleshooting it.
If you’re only going to produce one unit of something, sure, a 3d printed case is fine. But for more than a few units, 3d printing is really expensive. And the molded enclosures have a much better finish.
Design time. A project box is done and dusted as long as it fits your board(s). For a custom 3D printed enclosure you need to do design work. That is unless you are getting an existing design off of shapeways or some such site, in which case you are just buying a project box.