The Uncertain 7-Cube

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Contributors: Nick Poole
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The Enclosure

Cubes are a nice shape. They’re made up of regular planes and are therefore really easy to fabricate out of almost anything. I decided that laser cut acrylic was the fastest way to make a really good looking enclosure. To make the basic box shape, I used an awesome online tool called BoxMaker which takes the dimensions of your box and the thickness of your material and generates a vector file with the pattern. I imported the pattern into InkScape (a free vector drawing tool) and added a little flair of my own.

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After I had the file drawn out, I sent it to the laser cutter. The thin lines were cut and the thick features and shapes were raster etched. When the pieces came out of the laser cutter I cleaned them with a plastic polish and painted inside of the etched features using a white paint pen.

When everything was clean and dry, it was puzzle time. I started by screwing the electronics to the bottom plate of the cube. There were three holes cut in the piece that would match the position of the standoffs. I used a handheld drill to add a chamfer to the holes which would hide the head of the machine screws.

Once the core was in place, I started assembling the cube one panel at a time using hot glue. I left one panel loose so that I could still access the board to change/charge the battery or connect to the emic2 module’s headphone jack.