Top ten tips when specifying small metal and plastic enclosures

03 May 2019

Your new industrial electronic product has been designed and the board components specified. It has been prototyped, either on a development board to check functionality and performance or laid out on a final PCB design.

It has been debugged, tested, tweaked, tested again and finally signed off for production. So far, so good. Now all that has to be done is to decide on the choice of enclosure for it.

In the ideal world, the enclosure would have been selected far earlier in the process, so that the size constraints of the PCB would be known. In the real world, the first question is normally, “what size box do I need”.

Hammond Electronics list below the criteria that need to be considered when the enclosure is specified. These relate to standard or modified enclosures, which are normally the best choice for low/medium volume applications. For consumer-facing products, where volumes are expected to be far higher, a fully custom enclosure is normally the best approach.

Read the full article in the May issue of DPA