No 3D printer? You can still build a case for that circuit board!

So, you’ve come to the end of your hardware development project, and now you’re wondering about how to encase the whole thing. Perhaps, like me, you have a tiny MPU-6050 (accelerometer and gyroscope), now connected to breadboard, dangling from a tiny connector:

Look at all those tiny components on the chip — it’s like a small city! How can I use something this fragile in my embedded hardware solution?

Bunches of people build tiny super-fragile breadboard things like this, then post “Look what I built!” pictures online. What is rarely covered is the next step in the process — building or somehow creating a case or enclosure for what you’ve built.

Faced with this problem (with my MPU-6050 pictured above), I repeatedly Googled “homemade circuit board case” and variants thereof, but all I could find were recommendations to just 3D print a circuit board case. Not wanting to invest in a 3D printer for this one-time project (or have to learn all about CAD and 3D design), I instead decided to try and build something with Perler beads.

Perler beads (marketed here in Japan as “nano beads”) are awesome. I chose the smallest diameter size (2.5mm, I think), and also got a small pegboard (pictured below). The idea is that you assemble them into the shape you want (using the pegboard), then apply heat via a clothes iron. The beads all fuse together, leaving you with a rigid plastic plate.

A thousand ‘nano beads’ and a pegboard (about $8)

It took six such plates (about 250 individual Perler beads) to make an enclosure to fit my MPU-6050. The plates are pictured below. My idea was to stack the plates, then secure them together with screws and bolts (also pictured below):

These are the plates! If you put the MPU-6050 in the square bracket and stack the plates around it, it fits quite securely.

For those of you who prefer cartoon-ish pencil sketches over actual pictures, this is kind of how I stacked everything all up:

The stack!

In the end, the MPU-6050 fit perfectly into the Perler bead enclosure, and my project was complete, all for a total cost of about $10 (for the Perler beads, pegboard, and nuts & bolts). Hope this inspires you for your next hardware project! Know that there are alternatives to 3D printing, despite a lack of mentions online.

The enclosure, fully built and assembled.