Custom Plastic Enclosure Design with PCBA, Battery, and Membrane Switch
Challenge
Epec was approached by a customer looking for us to come up with what originally started as they needed: a plastic injection molded enclosure. Their product included a battery, some cables, and PCBA inside, and originally, we were just tasked with designing and then producing this enclosure.
They had certain ratings, for example, like IP ratings and material requirements, and we were tasked with coming up with this design, creating a model for it, drawings, constructing prototypes, and then obviously having this eventually move into production.
Solution
Epec’s engineering department recognized that the customer didn’t have the design expertise that Epec was able to provide. Epec has its own mechanical and electrical engineers who could provide this design work and also provide technical expertise and experience. The engineers had produced a lot of these membrane switch projects before and constantly with PCBAs and batteries, so not only did Epec know their primary need was their enclosure, but everything else that went kind of inside of it, we were experts on as well. Epec had the technical expertise and the bandwidth to back them up.
Epec was able to provide them the expertise they didn't have. It wasn't just us being a built-to-print manufacturer in this case; the customer had a list of requirements, and it was our job to see what we could design that would meet those requirements, prove that it would work, and then being able to provide them with whatever they need to instill confidence in their project. This included providing models, drawings, prototypes and then accompanying any changes along the way, whether it was updating the model, creating different versions of parts with different materials, or providing prototypes with our many manufacturing methods. All that expertise, all the prototypes, and everything that we did, that wasn't readily available to them that they could do, is where Epec stepped in.
Production-ready custom enclosure kit.
Result
Epec recently shipped some of this order and ended up going through this full development cycle of bringing multiple designs for this customer that really matured over the last couple of years.
Epec had their requirements where they wanted this two-chamber plastic enclosure, but along the way ended up changing that to be only one chamber. We ended up going through different design iterations, utilizing our on-hand 3D printers to create physical models to help showcase our design to them.
We performed our own water submersion and spray testing to help simulate what IP Rating test the enclosure would endure, and this way we were able to get a good faith idea of how it would perform. We were then responsible for reaching out to our suppliers to have parts built, to have prototypes and samples built, sending them to the customer for testing, and reviewing together.
What we ended up with was a kit that not only included this enclosure but also included some other pieces to their assembly that they wanted, such as anything to mount the enclosure, a membrane switch that would fit inside of it, hardware, and more. Anything used to assemble to enclosure together was sent to the customer.
Looking For A Custom Enclosure Design?
From design to production, our team of experienced engineers at Epec is here to help you design a production ready solution for your application.
Request Design Support
