A while back, you may remember that I had to put together an RS-232 level shifter for my NSLU2’s serial console. It’s been working reliably so far, despite hanging loose as a bare piece of stripboard dangling from the other end of the cable that comes out of the NSLU2.
When I was in Maplin the other day, I spotted a suitably sized little black box and bought it on the offchance that it would nicely fit my level shifter. I set about cutting a hole big enough for the 9-pin D connector, and a small hole for the NSLU2 cable. At first I tried using a rotary multitool as I had seen someone demonstrating in YouTube, but it was very smelly and not particularly effective, so I finished the job much more easily with a sharp scalpel. The same went for cutting the stripboard down to size.
The project took some gentle encouragement to squeeze into place, but once in place it held so solidly that my initial plan of fixing it into place with a glue gun was no longer necessary.
After putting the screws on and enjoying the new neat and tidy (ish) black box which is now in place of the fragile-looking stripboard, I fired up the PC and made sure that the level shifter still worked. It did.
This box is nothing special, but this is the first time that I can remember bothering to enclose a piece of electronics that I have built.
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