Copper-clad enclosures

Building a great looking box for your projects can be a challenge. [Ken] boils down his process of building enclosures out of copper clad (PDF) circuit board material into an illustrated guide in case you want to try this for yourself. Why would you want to use PC board? The fiberglass substrate makes for a strong and lightweight material. Also, [Ken] is a ham radio operator and the copper coating acts as an electrical shield for delicate components inside.
As you can see above he uses solder to tack the pieces together. There’s some important considerations that go along with this method. First, he cuts the pieces just a bit oversized and then sands them flat and square before assembly. Next, he uses some 20 gauge wire as a shim between a ninety-degree joint and a right angle jig. This shim compensates for the shrinking that occurs as the solder cools, making sure the joint gets pulled to a right angle. He even solders nuts in place so that screws can be used to attach the case cover to the chassis.
Yesterday we saw toner transfer used to make labels on an ABS case. If you make your enclosure out of copper clad, using toner transfer for panel labels will be a snap!

Designing an RF transceiver

[William Dillon] is finishing up his degree. His final project as a student was to design an RF transceiver. He decided to work with the Microchip MRF49XA, which runs around $3 but will cost you $20 if you want it in a ready-to-use module. He didn’t find a lot of info on the Internet about communicating with these chips so he’s shared his design, code, and board files. If you’re ever wanted to delve into RF design this is a good primer. [William] talks about building around the example circuit from the datasheet but also includes a discussion of the calculations he made in working with the 434 MHz band, and an AVR-based library for using his module.