The Thinking Behind the Chameleon 1 Enclosure
Synopsis: The great thing about being a geek is being able to design and build stuff - see a thought become reality. That’s what happened when we made the Chameleon 1, an enclosure system for various popular development boards including the NGW100, Arduino, various Olimex boards. It even accommodates some RF devices including the XBee Explorer Regulated from Sparkfun and the MegaMini long-range data radio from FreeWave.
Some of the story behind the Chameleon 1 enclosure follows in the form of our history of custom enclosure designs we’ve done over the years. We wanted to reveal the motivations we had for creating it.
Today we launched our first retail product through Sparkfun Electronics in Boulder, the Chameleon 1 enclosure for development boards. We’ve been a customer of Sparkfun for years, we’ve gone to many of their classes, developed lots of systems over the years, but now, we find ourselves in a new role, supplier to Sparkfun. That’s a pretty cool progression and we’re very proud to be associated. I think Sparkfun will be a fantastic modern case-study in how to do “small business.” Nate has had a great vision for the company and we wanted to put some of our innovations in their capable hands.
My business partner, Steve Fontana, and I have struggled for many years with the same problem - enclosures that never fit, are too expensive, or not tough enough. Due to the dearth of capable enclosures, for years, we’ve milled our own solutions for vehicle location systems and metropolitan area RF networks built on FreeWave radios.
When I say “milled”, I mean: buy a large block of solid aluminum and start carving - that kind of milled. Steve has a production quality mill and lathe in his shop and hogs these things out by hand for the first few prototypes. He’s got the design in his head and with the help of some home-made jigs, essentially free-hands it like a sculptor until he gets what he wants. We’ve made some pretty cool enclosures over the years, but boy are they beefy. They had to be for the vehicle environments we were going into.
Here’s a small portfolio of enclosures we’ve made in the past. None of these are available retail, though if you have an interest purchasing any of these designs, please contact us.
Milled aluminum black box, completely sealed. These enclosures ended up under the seat of Colorado Springs city snow-plows and street sweepers (those guys are merciless when it comes to equipment) and are used for vehicle location. I’ve pulled some of these out of the snow plows for maintenance or upgrading and they would have 1/4” of dirty, greasy sludge on them. Inside, they’re as clean and pristine as when we loaded them with their PC/104 hearts - they have rubber lid gasket and 8 socket head bolts to keep things tight. They aren’t pretty by Apple standards but they did the job they were designed to do in a wicked hostile environment.
The Gold Box. We have one enclosure design which can be seen on nearly every one of the 500+ signalized intersections in Colorado Springs. The enclosure contains a FreeWave radio and has a bolt-on arm to hold a 2-3 foot 2.4GHz stick antenna (Antenex.) We call this design simply “The Gold Box”. Here it is mounted in its glory in various configurations:
If you’re a FreeWave customer, you would very likely be interested in the Gold Box. Please contact us if so.
The Red Box. This is the mother of all enclosures we’ve designed. Again, a completely milled aluminum enclosure, it holds two stacks of PC/104 electronics, has a removable hard drive caddy and removable fan caddies. This was designed back in the day when the quest was for Speed, Power be damned. We had a Pentium III running Windows XP Embedded (yeow/yuck) booting from compact flash, a FreeWave 900 MHz radio for location RF, an UPS, and a Cisco WiFi PCMCIA card so the unit could sync with base stations when it came into proximity.
The entire two-stack PC/104 array was bolted to a slide out drawer so you could remove an end-plate and slide the entire thing out of the box. The entire enclosure was basically a clam-shell design. For many years, there was one of these under the seat of every fire truck in Colorado Springs doing emergency vehicle location. It ran a client/server ESRI mapping application on an Elo touch screen mounted in the navigator’s position of the fire engine.
Despite two fans, there were a few times in the summer season when these enclosures would reach 160 degrees on the exterior...almost enough to start a fire in a fire truck. We probed temperature sensors in the units and radio’d the temps back so we could monitor the entire fleet during the summer and the units could shut down on over-temp conditions.
Don’t think we’d ever design another in-vehicle unit like that (for lots of different reasons) - it was a total bad-boy though and nothing says “FIRE!” like the anodized red shell and silver caddies. You almost expect Santa to pop out of it.
We’ve done variations on these major enclosure themes, but the common denominator is that they are all milled aluminum, strong enough to fall off the back of a HumVee and get run over by a tank. And for the emergency and military applications we needed them for, there was nothing else on the market like it.
The Chameleon 1
That brings us to the Chameleon 1. Everything we saw on the market that was lightweight or general purpose was too flimsy, had no faceplate, or didn’t fit our space requirements. We needed something the market didn’t supply - a ready-made enclosure for various development boards we like to use.
So, we invented the Chameleon 1 which is inexpensive, super-strong, and custom-fit for some of the popular development boards like the NGW100 embedded linux, AVR32 board. You can read more about it on our www.esawdust.com website or go to Sparkfun.com who is reselling the Chameleon 1.
We started with the simple fact: there is no enclosure for the NGW100 and we would like to have one. In fact we’d like to have one for an Arduino and some of the Olimex boards, too. We hate making faceplates with Dremel tools which end up looking like Freddy Krueger specials, so we wanted real, honest to goodness faceplates that fit. We wanted to use the same enclosure for various boards so we didn’t have a one-off enclosure design for each board type. We didn’t want to have to buy feet for the dumb thing just to mount it like so many other enclosure makers have. And it had to be tough, strong, and stand up to some modest punishment.
Whala: The Chameleon 1 was the end result of our quest for an enclosure that met those needs.
Hope you like it. Send us suggestions for other development board types you like and would like to see us support. Or you can send us a Tweet about what boards you’d like to see us support at @ESawdust
Some of the story behind the Chameleon 1 enclosure follows in the form of our history of custom enclosure designs we’ve done over the years. We wanted to reveal the motivations we had for creating it.
Today we launched our first retail product through Sparkfun Electronics in Boulder, the Chameleon 1 enclosure for development boards. We’ve been a customer of Sparkfun for years, we’ve gone to many of their classes, developed lots of systems over the years, but now, we find ourselves in a new role, supplier to Sparkfun. That’s a pretty cool progression and we’re very proud to be associated. I think Sparkfun will be a fantastic modern case-study in how to do “small business.” Nate has had a great vision for the company and we wanted to put some of our innovations in their capable hands.
My business partner, Steve Fontana, and I have struggled for many years with the same problem - enclosures that never fit, are too expensive, or not tough enough. Due to the dearth of capable enclosures, for years, we’ve milled our own solutions for vehicle location systems and metropolitan area RF networks built on FreeWave radios.
When I say “milled”, I mean: buy a large block of solid aluminum and start carving - that kind of milled. Steve has a production quality mill and lathe in his shop and hogs these things out by hand for the first few prototypes. He’s got the design in his head and with the help of some home-made jigs, essentially free-hands it like a sculptor until he gets what he wants. We’ve made some pretty cool enclosures over the years, but boy are they beefy. They had to be for the vehicle environments we were going into.
Here’s a small portfolio of enclosures we’ve made in the past. None of these are available retail, though if you have an interest purchasing any of these designs, please contact us.
Milled aluminum black box, completely sealed. These enclosures ended up under the seat of Colorado Springs city snow-plows and street sweepers (those guys are merciless when it comes to equipment) and are used for vehicle location. I’ve pulled some of these out of the snow plows for maintenance or upgrading and they would have 1/4” of dirty, greasy sludge on them. Inside, they’re as clean and pristine as when we loaded them with their PC/104 hearts - they have rubber lid gasket and 8 socket head bolts to keep things tight. They aren’t pretty by Apple standards but they did the job they were designed to do in a wicked hostile environment.
The Gold Box. We have one enclosure design which can be seen on nearly every one of the 500+ signalized intersections in Colorado Springs. The enclosure contains a FreeWave radio and has a bolt-on arm to hold a 2-3 foot 2.4GHz stick antenna (Antenex.) We call this design simply “The Gold Box”. Here it is mounted in its glory in various configurations:
If you’re a FreeWave customer, you would very likely be interested in the Gold Box. Please contact us if so.
The Red Box. This is the mother of all enclosures we’ve designed. Again, a completely milled aluminum enclosure, it holds two stacks of PC/104 electronics, has a removable hard drive caddy and removable fan caddies. This was designed back in the day when the quest was for Speed, Power be damned. We had a Pentium III running Windows XP Embedded (yeow/yuck) booting from compact flash, a FreeWave 900 MHz radio for location RF, an UPS, and a Cisco WiFi PCMCIA card so the unit could sync with base stations when it came into proximity.
The entire two-stack PC/104 array was bolted to a slide out drawer so you could remove an end-plate and slide the entire thing out of the box. The entire enclosure was basically a clam-shell design. For many years, there was one of these under the seat of every fire truck in Colorado Springs doing emergency vehicle location. It ran a client/server ESRI mapping application on an Elo touch screen mounted in the navigator’s position of the fire engine.
Despite two fans, there were a few times in the summer season when these enclosures would reach 160 degrees on the exterior...almost enough to start a fire in a fire truck. We probed temperature sensors in the units and radio’d the temps back so we could monitor the entire fleet during the summer and the units could shut down on over-temp conditions.
Don’t think we’d ever design another in-vehicle unit like that (for lots of different reasons) - it was a total bad-boy though and nothing says “FIRE!” like the anodized red shell and silver caddies. You almost expect Santa to pop out of it.
We’ve done variations on these major enclosure themes, but the common denominator is that they are all milled aluminum, strong enough to fall off the back of a HumVee and get run over by a tank. And for the emergency and military applications we needed them for, there was nothing else on the market like it.
The Chameleon 1
That brings us to the Chameleon 1. Everything we saw on the market that was lightweight or general purpose was too flimsy, had no faceplate, or didn’t fit our space requirements. We needed something the market didn’t supply - a ready-made enclosure for various development boards we like to use.
So, we invented the Chameleon 1 which is inexpensive, super-strong, and custom-fit for some of the popular development boards like the NGW100 embedded linux, AVR32 board. You can read more about it on our www.esawdust.com website or go to Sparkfun.com who is reselling the Chameleon 1.
We started with the simple fact: there is no enclosure for the NGW100 and we would like to have one. In fact we’d like to have one for an Arduino and some of the Olimex boards, too. We hate making faceplates with Dremel tools which end up looking like Freddy Krueger specials, so we wanted real, honest to goodness faceplates that fit. We wanted to use the same enclosure for various boards so we didn’t have a one-off enclosure design for each board type. We didn’t want to have to buy feet for the dumb thing just to mount it like so many other enclosure makers have. And it had to be tough, strong, and stand up to some modest punishment.
Whala: The Chameleon 1 was the end result of our quest for an enclosure that met those needs.
Hope you like it. Send us suggestions for other development board types you like and would like to see us support. Or you can send us a Tweet about what boards you’d like to see us support at @ESawdust
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