Simple products contain the most complex processes in design. In Odak’s design, we try to use every inch of space in the box. In case you don’t know about the Odak, it’s an air quality monitor that we develop in Mountain Labs.
Combining multiple sensors in a 9x7 box along with a big battery and a relatively large screen is not a small task. We had to do 3 revisions on the design to reach the final one.
Version 1: We use wood pieces at the sides and we place buttons on the front panel. We have also an LED bar at the top. It has sharp corners. The planned size was 9x7x2.5 cm. We noticed that it won’t be a very durable design since the sides will unite with some cohesive solution, it may easily wear down with time and by different weather conditions.
Version 2: We moved to a one-wooden body solution and a plastic front panel. We made some progress on the PCB for this design and the dimensions have jumped to 12x8x2.7 cm. You can notice the screen/body rate got smaller here which we didn’t like. We’re trying to avoid plastic injection in this version but this design brings the plastic injections as a must to the table. This design had some issues with assembly as well.
Version 3: We thought why not use the wood surface on the front panel and use the plastic for the back cover? … and the design you see below came out. We moved buttons to the top and improved the screen/body rate. Still not perfect but fair enough for this version. We came closer to our planned dimensions in concept design with 9.5x7.5x3 cm. We enhanced the UI/UX on the epaper as well.
What do you think? Looks good or bad, let me know in the comments.
What’s next?
To manufacture this case on CNC, we must make some changes to the design, the sharp corners will be reviewed, and we must take care of tolerances between the body and PCB, body and screen, also body and buttons. We need to go through a couple of iterations until we reach a golden sample.
Material selection is also another course that we have to take care of since we’re planning to use wood. There are plenty of different types of wood and they have also divisions in their merging techniques.
We may need to sleep next to the CNC machine in the upcoming weeks :) Let’s see how it goes and wish us luck!
That’s all for now. Have a great weekend! See you at the next post.
Bye 🙋🏻♂️