How to Design a Wemos D1 mini ESP8266 Enclosure with Fusion 360

In this video we are going to learn how to design and 3D print an enclosure for a Wemos D1 mini esp8266 enclosure board using Fusion 360 software. It is an easy Fusion 360 Tutorial. Without any further delay let’s get started!

WHERE TO BUY
Wemos D1 Mini: http://educ8s.tv/part/D1Mini

Solar Caliper: http://bit.ly/SolarCaliper

Dear friends, welcome to another video. This is Nick from educ8s.tv and today we are going to learn how to design and 3D print an enclosure for a Wemos D1 mini board using Fusion 360 software. Without any further delay let’s get started. A few months back, I brought my first 3D printer a Wanhao Duplicator i3. Since then, I was 3D printing some files that I have downloaded from the internet, but I wanted to learn how to design my own things. I tried a lot of 3D design software but Fusion 360 became my favorite for the following reasons:
It is very powerful
It is absolutely free
It is very easy to use
There are a lot of tutorials online on how to use the software.

As you are going to find out, designing this enclosure won’t take us more than 5 minutes from start to finish on Fusion 360.First of all, we have to download the Fusion 360 software. You will find a download link in the description of the video. After the download is complete, we have to setup the software and create an Auto Desk free account. When you open Fusion select, the trial counter in the upper toolbar, it will appear up here, I am already registered so it does not appear in my machine. If you press it, you can select Register for free use and you can register as an enthusiast which is free. That’s it, our software is set up and ready to use. First, we are going to make a sketch of our enclosure based on some measurements of the D1 mini board. On a white paper, I draw the outline of the board, and I write down the measurements from a caliper. So it is 35.3mmx27mm. Lets now measure the Z dimension. It’s around 6.6mm.Now that we have the exact dimension of the board, we can design the enclosure in Fusion360. On a new design, we press the Create Sketch button, a very powerful tool of Fusion. Now select a plane to draw o. We select this plane. From the sketch menu, we select the 2 point rectangle. We place it on the centre and we enter the dimension of the board. 

This is going to be the inside of the enclosure. We make it a little bigger than the actual dimensions so I enter 36mm here and 27.5 here, and I click to place it. Now let’s make the enclosure, 3mm thick. We go to sketch offset. Then we select the rectangle we have designed. We move it this way in order to create a bigger rectangle and we enter 3mm.This will be the thickness of the walls of the enclosure. We now press the stop sketch button. Now we go to the create menu and we select the Extrude command. We then select the small rectangle and we extrude it upwards by 3mm.Thats the base of the enclosure we are going to create! Now let’s make the walls. We enable the sketch again, and we now select the big rectangle. We extrude it by 13 mm.A simple enclosure just appeared. Now let’s make an opening for the USB cable.

 From my measurement, it has to be around 17mm mm in width. So we select the front face of the enclosure and then we click to create a new sketch to it. We create a rectangle with a width of 17mm and a height of 10mm and we place it at the center. You can always move a sketch with a left click and by selecting the move action. We then press the stop Sketch button again. We then select the new rectangle and we press the extrude button and we enter 3mm extrusion. 

The opening has been created, By pressing the home icon here, we return to the default view of the model. I now select this face in order to create two more rectangles in order the D1 mini to sit in and leave some space at the bottom for the wires. So I create a 2 point rectangle here, and a smaller one close to the USB opening. Then I press the Stop Sketch button and I extrude both rectangles, one by 5mm and the other by 3mm.I discovered these values by trial and error since the D1 mini has an irregular height. The last step is to create a small hole for the wires. We turn the model around by holding down shift and pressing the middle button of the mouse. We select back face of the enclosure and we press the create sketch button. We create a two point circle.

 We set the diameter of the circle at 4mm.We stop the sketch and we extrude this way in order to create the hole. That’s it. The bottom of the enclosure is ready. Let’s print it. I am going to print the part, using Color fabbs white PLA. While the part is printing let me tell you about the new Android game I have developed. Since 2014 I develop mobile games for a living and a few months ago I developed a new game which is called Quiz of Knowledge. It is a quiz game, developed for Android which contains thousands of multiple choice questions. It supports 6 languages and it is completely free. If you like Quiz games, you can download Quiz of knowledge from the Google Play Store now by clicking here or by following a link for the game in the description of the video. Thanks. 50 minutes later, the parts are ready and as you can see, the Wemos D1 mini board fits nicely in it. Now it is time to design the top part of the enclosure which is much easier. All we have to do is to create a new Sketch and draw a 2 point rectangle The dimensions of is must be the same with the bottom so we enter, 42 mm and 33.5mm.We stop the sketch and we extrude it 2mm.If we move it in place, we can see that it fits perfectly.

 Now with the same procedure we design a circle with a diameter of 5.1mm for the LED and we extrude it by 2mm in order to create a hole. If you wish, you can also make some openings like these by sketching some rectangles. The top cover is ready. Let’s print it! 20 minutes later, our simple enclosure is complete. Of course there are a lot of improvements that can be made to this design. This is just a demonstration that within minutes and with little knowledge of the fusion 360 software, we can achieve great results. With tools like 3D printers, we can now move our project to another level. I am very excited with the 3D printing technology and the application of it. I am very new to 3D design and as I learn more design tricks with the software, I will share them with you with tutorials like this one. I would love to hear your opinion about Fusion 360. Have you used it in any of your projects and do you have any tricks to share with us? Please post your comments in the comment section below. Thanks.

In this channel I post videos about DIY projects every Saturday. I love making things and I believe that anyone can make things, anyone can become a maker. That’s why I created this channel in order to share my knowledge with the community and learn from the community. I hope you enjoyed it.

This video is made by educ8s.tv, click here to see the original youtube video.