How to Select an Electronics Enclosure

My puppy got to play very hard, for many hours, this past Saturday. He was still so worn out on Sunday that he didn’t leave the couch. Which gave me the perfect opportunity to curl up with him and relax without having a crazed puppy running around. It was a nice change of pace, although I was completely baffled by the amount of commercials on TV. And can I tell you: out of all the commercials I saw, all I remember is that Applebee’s Ultimate Trio has over 200 possible combinations. I just kept thinking, how would you decide which of the items you would want?

With over 1400 styles, colors and sizes, our customers often have a similar concern with Polycase enclosures. Customers call in to our customer service department, requesting help with narrowing down the enclosure selection. One of the most successful ways to select an enclosure is to know where to begin.

Here are 2 steps to making the selection easier:

Step 1: Determine the size
Begin by determining the size of the components. Will you need a battery pack? If so, how many batteries? Besides the PCB, what else needs to be secured within the enclosure? Lights, LCDs, switches? PCBs can easily be customized to pretty much any size you needed. Custom molding plastic electronic enclosures tends to be extremely expensive and time consuming.

Step 2: Select Enclosure
Based on the size of the “assembled” project, you can determine what size the enclosure needs to be to house all of the components. You’ll want to leave some extra room within the enclosure. Keep in mind: All of Polycase’s posted dimensions are external. Therefore, if your assembled project is 3.5 x 2.75 x 1”, you will want to select an enclosure that is at least 4 x 3 x 1.5” to accommodate wall thickness.

Next, we’ll explore how the Polycase website helps funnel down the options based on the choices you make.