Adafruit Feather 2.4" Display Laser Cut Case

October 02, 2017

We love the Adafruit TFT Featherwing, it is a great way to add an interactive display to your project.  One of our favourite projects with this display is to make an ESP8266 Weather Station.  Rather than making a 3D printed case, we thought we'd build one using our Glowforge laser cutter!

We'll skip the electronics portion of this project, see the link above to learn about that.  Also learn more from Daniel Eichorn's excellent ESP8266 blog.  Instead we'll focus on how we made the case.

We took some measurements and decided on a 75 x 62 x 28 mm case.  This would fit the Huzzah ESP8266 Feather, the TFT featherwing, and a 500 mAh battery.  Note, you can use a bigger battery, you just need to make the case about 10 mm taller to do so.  

The Huzzah Feather's headers are about 2 mm longer than necessary; we cut them down using our super scissors so the Feather would sit flush to the Featherwing

Before

After

Next, we began working in MakerCase, a great online tool for making laser cut boxes.  Since the material we cut was 1/8", we had to convert everything into inches.  MakerCase is nice because in addition to the basic box form, you can add cut-outs and you can also engrave.  So we added 4 holes for the screw, as well as a rectangular cutout for the display and a small cutout for the USB charger port. We then export an SVG file from MakerCase.

 

Now all we had to do was import the SVG file into the Glowforge app.  It takes about 30 seconds to process, and then we were ready to go!

We used Glowforge proofgrade Maple Medium Hard Maple Plywood which always gives us nice results.  2 minutes of cutting, and we had our case form!

Next, we secured the touchscreen assembly to the case with some 2.5mm screws and then we connected the battery.  We glued everything together, and here are the results!  We could not be more happy with how it turned out.

Checkout the SVG file here if you'd like to make your own!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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