[Coco] miniFLASH product

[Kip Koon]

Hi Ron!
I have some small projects I'd like to try and I have only one long plastic
coco cartridge case blank which is way too long for what I need.  What are
the sizes of the case and mounting style / type for PCBs?  I'm learning PCB
design using some really small project ideas I've come up with and would
like to eventually  put cases on them both to plug into the Coco or MPI and
single board computers I'm designing.  Since I'm using the free version of
Cadsoft's Eagle program, I'm limited to about 4" x 4" PCBs though most of my
projects thus far are incredibly smaller than that. 
What can you do with machining cases and what do you have on hand at the
moment?  Thank you in advance and take care my friend.
Kip

-----Original Message-----
From: coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com [mailto:coco-bounces at maltedmedia.com] On
Behalf Of Ron Bihler
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2013 8:18 AM
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [Coco] miniFLASH product

On 9/10/2013 10:55 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> On Sep 10, 2013, at 14:12 , Al Hartman <alhartman6 at optonline.net> wrote:
>> Nobody is going to make enough of them today to make the tooling costs
worthwhile. I would use a vacuformed case if I had to today. 3D printed
cases would be too expensive.
> I've done a couple of injection molded designs at work, manufactured by a
company called Proto-Mold. I would guesstimate that if I duplicated the
original Program Pak enclosure, say, just the top and bottom without the
sliding door and the undercuts/side actions that it requires, the tooling
would probably cost about $7k-&10k. After that, boxes would cost around $5
each in small quantity with a cheap resin like black ABS, plus $500 setup
per run ($250 per mold, if I recall correctly). A longer enclosure would
cost a bit more.
>
> Custom molded plastics for a CoCo project would only be doable if a rich
person chose to dump money into the tooling with no hope for financial
return. I might dump a hundred bucks into having a single case machined out
of a couple blocks of plastic for a personal project, but I think it would
be hard to find a hundred people willing to spend a hundred bucks each to
have a small run of custom molded cases made. It's too bad, because making
custom plastic is kinda fun.
>
> Incidentally, both of my work projects were custom enclosures for
evaluation kits for my company's chips. One was a small two-piece box made
from clear polycarbonate, and the other was a larger 4-piece box made of a
white ABS resin called Lustran. Both had the company logo molded into the
top, and both turned out great. I was pretty happy with the results,
considering that I have no formal training in industrial design. I'm an
electrical engineer by trade, but my hobbies and interests include machining
and mechanical design, and Proto-Mold does a great job of giving their
customers a crash course in molded plastic design. They also have great
design rule checking of submitted designs.
>
I was machining Rogers cases for a few bucks each.  This works for small
numbers, Injection molding is the best for larger qty's but the initial
7-10k is difficult to handle.

If anyone needs a small project case for the Coco I still have a few of the
cases around.

Ron Bihler


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